


The Cardboard Hedgehog (and Other Stories)

by the_wordbutler



Series: Motion Practice [16]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Legal Drama, M/M, Suffolk County Judicial Complex Staff, motion practice universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-11
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-29 01:44:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 29,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/999399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wordbutler/pseuds/the_wordbutler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)</p><p>In today's installment, Grant's morning coffee stop is a little different than all the others.</p><p>(Shut up, Skye.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Cardboard Personality Boy Intern

**Author's Note:**

> This story originally started as a quick gift for Little-Alternative-Girl. It blossomed into something much more complicated. I would apologize, but I am not actually sorry.
> 
> All events take place from May 2013 on, or during the pendency of "Diversions." However, you are not required to read "Diversions" to understand this story; each installment will stand mostly on its own, and although the two tales are related, they are not so intertwined that you cannot read the one without the other. They will simply reference one another through tangents and funny little happenings. At least, one hopes. 
> 
> Saranoh and Jen are the speediest betas on the planet. What would I do without them?

“She can’t be that bad,” Skye sighs as she drops her change into the tip jar.

“My office mailbox label reads ‘Cardboard Personality Boy Intern.’” Skye bursts out laughing loudly enough that he can’t hear the barista welcoming him to the coffee shop. He shoots her a murderous look. “It’s not funny.”

“Oh, you’re right. It’s not funny.” He nods his thanks at her and starts to order his Americano (extra hot). “It’s _hilarious_.”

The barista snorts a laugh, and Grant Ward tries very hard not to roll his eyes at both of them.

Grant’s liked the coffee shop across the street from the judicial complex ever since he worked there his junior year of undergrad as a runner and general lackey to the county commissioner. It’s close to work, the coffee’s always fresh, and their two-for-one muffin deal on Thursdays kills two breakfasts with one stone. He even likes his daily company, even if he’s not entirely sure why he hangs out with her.

Skye leans over the counter to steal a cinnamon stick for her complicated soy drink. “I’m not saying that Darcy’s not crazy, but she might also be right,” she comments while the barista starts grinding the espresso. “You can be a little—”

She waves the cinnamon stick at him, and he frowns. “What?”

“I don’t know. Prickly.” He rolls his eyes, and she leans a hip against the counter. “Isn’t that what you said the interviewer said about you? Smart, put together, but the human equivalent of a hedgehog?”

“Porcupine, actually.”

“See? That’s what I mean!” She jabs him in the arm with the cinnamon, leaving a faint rust-colored mark on his white shirt. “Who _corrects_ someone over that?”

“Someone who values the right information?” Grant asks.

“No, someone who’s an asshole.” The barista sets Skye’s drink down on the corner, and she drops the cinnamon stick into it before grabbing a lid. “You’re always like this. Unapproachable, thoroughly unpleasant—”

“And yet you follow me to the coffee shop every day,” he points out.

“—and just generally kind of a jerk. Which is fine, because I’m attracted to jerks like a moth to a flame, but jesus.” She heaves a sigh. “No wonder you never get laid.”

Despite his years of law school—and, before that, his years of being tormented by his brother—Grant gapes at her in surprise. “I do okay for myself, thank you very—”

“Sorry, hi, sorry,” a voice interrupts. Grant snaps his jaw shut just as a younger guy sidles up to the counter and slides between he and Skye. He wears a plaid shirt with an exceptionally skinny tie, and Grant’s struck by the thought that he recognizes him—or, if not him, his accent. “I placed an order over the phone fifteen minutes ago, name of—”

“Fitzsimmons, right?” the barista asks.

“Actually, Fitz and Simmons. We’re not the same person. It’s actually not very complicated, but she was talking over me at the time and . . . ” He trails off when he realizes the barista’s staring at him. “Fitzsimmons,” he finally says.

“I’ll get your order!” the barista chirps.

Skye, who’d started staring at the guy the second he entered the coffee shop, suddenly grins and snaps her fingers. “Hey, I know you! You’re one of the weird clerks!” she announces. Her finger rotates in an uneven circle, and Grant resists his urge to roll his eyes. Fitzsimmons—if that is actually his name—gives her a once-over. His attention starts just below her chin, lingers just below her chin, and then travels down the rest of her.

Skye ignores it. “You’re one of the ones who do all those weird child-law things with Judge Smithe, aren’t you?” she presses. “You bring foster kids to that room back there with the trees on the wall, sometimes?”

Maybe-Fitzsimmons’s face tightens into a frown. “I’m not sure—”

“I’m Skye. I work in IT, down in the basement?” When he stares at her for another second, she sighs and starts moving her hands like she’s typing. “ _The network will be down from 6 p.m. until midnight for server updates, please save all work before you leave for the day_?”

“Oh, right!” the guy replies. He laughs comfortably, and Grant actually finds himself smiling. “Sorry, Simmons usually talks to the IT people when something breaks. I mostly tinker until someone takes it away and raps my knuckles.”

“Oh, we _hate_ your type downstairs,” Skye replies with one of her tighter smiles. 

He blinks at her again, and Grant sighs. “She thinks that’s humor,” he offers, shaking his head. “I’ve tried a dozen times to teach her real jokes—”

Skye scoffs. “You wouldn’t know a real joke if it bit you in the ass.”

“—but she’s still trying to pretend she’s funny on her own.”

“Says the guy who’s always spouting off law jokes nobody understands,” she retorts, turning up her nose. She glances over at maybe-Fitzsimmons, and Grant watches her scowl blossom into a truly evil grin. “Family law clerk guy, meet cardboard D.A. Office Intern-Boy.”

Grant rolls his eyes. “Grant Ward,” he corrects her, and offers maybe-Fitzsimmons his hand.

Maybe-Fitzsimmons smiles. It’s small enough that it’s almost shy. Grant’s not sure why, but he likes that. “I’ve seen you around. Actually, you’re a bit hard to miss.” Skye cackles so hard that she nearly chokes on her drink, and the guy’s face immediately flushes bright red. He stops reaching for Grant’s hand like he’s about to be scalded. “Which isn’t to say I noticed you especially, just that we always notice the fresh meat— Not to say you’re meat, necessarily, but new, and noticeable at that, and—”

Skye raises her eyebrows as he sputters to a stop. Grant suspects she wishes she had popcorn. “Go on.”

“No, I, uh— Fitz.” The guy sticks his hand out in front of him, and Grant frowns even as he shakes it. “Leo Fitz. Child and family community programming and assistant clerk of the court for the juvenile division. It’s nice to meet you.”

Grant cracks a tiny smile at the way Fitz—Leo—grips his hand way too hard. It’s earnest, and he likes earnest people. It’s probably why dry-humored Phil Coulson grates on his nerves so much. That, and the way the man’s impossible to read. “Do all clerks get this jumpy?”

“Well, you know, we’re a bit like anyone else when someone attract—” Skye snorts into her drink, and Leo drops Grant’s hand. “Maybe we’re a little jumpy,” he decides. “Might be why they keep us in the back, away from the normal people.”

“Or don’t want anyone stealing you and running off with all the building’s secrets.”

“I’m not too sure anyone’s in a rush to steal me,” Leo admits, but his face reddens again. The barista calls his name—well, she calls out “Fitzsimmons,” wherever the “Simmons” part comes from—and he jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Simmons gets a bit tetchy if I don’t bring her coffee while it’s still warm, so I’ll—”

“Yeah,” Grant agrees, nodding. “I’ll see you around, I’m sure.”

“And you know where to find me, at any rate,” Leo returns. This time, Skye definitely chokes on her coffee, and Grant rolls his eyes at her as he watches Leo gather up the order and hurry out the door. It’s a windy spring day outside, and a gust blows his tie and his messy hair sideways.

Grant only realizes he’s still staring out the door after the kid when Skye cackles again. “Shut up,” he mutters.

“No _way_ am I shutting up,” Skye retorts. She swigs her drink triumphantly. “You just attempted to flirt. Voluntarily. With another human being. Mark it down in the record books.”

“I was not trying to flirt.”

“Yeah, you were. What’s the next step, huh?” She elbows him in the arm until he steps away. “Turning him into your eye candy a la Chief Assistant What’s-His-Face?”

“You mean Coulson?” 

“If he’s the one with the hot boyfriend with the veiny arms, then yeah, I mean Coulson.” Grant snorts at her and rolls his eyes. He’s still trying to figure out how to side-step the conversation entirely when Skye elbows him again. 

“I don’t know why I spend time with you,” he grumbles.

“Because even sad little cardboard interns need love,” Skye retorts. She sips her drink again, more thoughtfully this time. “It’d be cute,” she decides.

Grant thanks the barista and lifts his coffee from the counter. “What would?”

“You and the clerk boy.” She points her paper cup toward the door as though Leo is still standing there. Grant firmly denies checking. “It’d be a nice change, you actually getting laid.”

He shakes his head. “In case you didn’t notice, he was very interested in your—” Skye arches an eyebrow, so he raises a hand and gestures vaguely to her chest. She’s wearing a v-cut sweater that leaves nothing to the imagination. “Your attributes.”

Skye laughs and tosses her hair. “Uh, if you think only straight guys are interested in my attributes, you’ve got a _lot_ to learn.” He finishes dumping creamer into his cup, and realizes as he takes his first sip that she’s staring at him. She worries her lips together, and he feels his face start creasing into a frown. “Yeah,” she decides once she’s done staring him down. “I can work with this.”

“Work with what, exactly?” Grant asks. When she smiles—a white-toothed, half-threatening shark’s smile—he groans. “Skye, no.”

“I didn’t say anything,” she replies, stepping away. She half-walks, half-dances toward the door, her ponytail bouncing behind her. Grant wonders if she’d murder him for pulling her hair like a ten-year-old. 

He puts the lid back on his coffee before he follows. “You don’t have to say it, because I already know you’re thinking it.”

“Thinking’s not a crime, Mister Future Attorney.” Grant cocks his head at her, and she tosses him a sly look. “You’ll have to come after me when I act.”

“You mean ‘if,’” Grant corrects.

“Oh, no,” Skye replies, flashing him another of those smiles. “I mean _when._ “


	2. The Poker Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant attends a poker game that is not, strictly speaking, _just_ a poker game.
> 
> (He's onto you, Skye.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, as always, to Jen and saranoh, who consistently respond to comments like _I think that series with Grant and Skye will continue_ with enthusiam, rather than dread.

“What do you think you’re doing?” 

“Uh, what does it look like I’m doing?” Skye retorts. She rips open a bag of chips and waves it vaguely in his direction. “I’m filling up the snack bowls in preparation for our kickass poker night. Did you not read the invite?”

“Skye,” Grant says, but she ignores him to dump the chips into a brightly-colored plastic bowl. When he catches her by the arm, she jerks away and stares at him like they’ve never met before. “This isn’t just poker night,” he accuses once she’s shot him at least three different dirty looks in rapid succession.

“And you can’t prove that,” Skye returns, trotting off with the overflowing bowl of Doritos.

Skye lives in a giant loft apartment that her parents supposedly bankroll, but given that Grant’s listed as her emergency contact on all her human resources forms, he suspects that the only father-figure in her life tacks the word “sugar” onto the title. There’s precious little furniture aside from the enormous green-felt poker table and five perfectly-upholstered chairs. Someday, he’ll figure out how Skye manages to string together insane ideas into workable plans. In the meantime, he stands on the far end of the kitchen and swigs his beer.

“He’s going to play, isn’t he?” asks Jemma Simmons. She’d introduced herself as _the second half of Fitz-Simmons, although most people assume we’re just a single person_ before kicking her shoes off in Skye’s foyer. She’s pretty—slender, soft-spoken, and wearing a plaid shirt. She’s also incredibly early.

Skye rolls her eyes and plops the bowl of chips down on the table. “Of course he’s going to play,” she replies. “He just _acts_ like his whole plan is to stand there and criticize everyone.”

“Everyone?” Grant retorts. He gestures around the enormously empty room while his voice echoes into oblivion. “You realize there are only three of us here, don’t you? We barely qualify as a boy band, let alone a full poker table.”

Skye throws up her hands as she starts stomping back across the apartment. “No, really? I thought we were going to split through osmosis and play poker against our clones.” 

“Actually,” Simmons begins, “the process of cell division is called ‘mitosis,’ not—” 

“And no more drinking my beer until you come sit at the table like a grown up,” she adds. When Grant lifts the bottle, she steals it right out of his fingers. “Beer is for fun people. Not that you’d know.”

“You do realize I know how to work a refrigerator, don’t you?”

“And _you_ do realize that I can reprogram your GPS to speak to you in Russian for the rest of your natural life, right?” Grant suspects that Skye’s overblown sneer is meant to mimic his frown. He rolls his eyes at her. “God, you are such a grump,” she continues. She swigs his beer before pointing the neck of the bottle at him. “Further proof you need to get laid.”

“I do not need to get laid,” Grant returns. Skye raises both her eyebrows, so he crosses his arms over his chest. “Just because your whole worldview revolves around sex making people happy doesn’t mean everyone else agrees.”

“Actually, people with an active sex life tend to be in overall better health,” Simmons pipes up from the poker table. She twists to look over at both of them. “It burns calories, increases immune system reactions, and generally improves your blood pressure and heart health.” When Grant frowns, she flushes slightly and tucks a strand of loose hair behind her ear. “I studied biology at university before I decided to go into law.”

“See?” Skye asks. Grant nearly groans at how outwardly smug that one word is. “Sex makes people healthy. And healthy people don’t die all alone in the district attorney’s intern office after seventy-five hours of motion writing—” 

“I stayed twenty minutes late,” he protests.

“—in a sorry attempt to impress Chief Assistant Boyfriend-to-the-Hottie Phil Coulson and earn his Super Nerd Merit B—”

“You really shouldn’t advertise that your buzzer’s broken,” a voice interrupts, and Grant nearly gives himself whiplash as he spins around to see _the_ Melinda May walking into Skye’s apartment. She carries a canvas grocery bag under one arm. “Just about anyone can walk in here.”

“Ooh, munchies!” Skye announces, abandoning Grant’s stolen beer to help May with her bag. Grant knows he should reclaim the bottle before Skye revokes it again, but he can’t help but stare at the newcomer. His mouth opens, closes, and then opens again.

Skye, helpfully, rolls her eyes. “Sorry, he’s not housebroken yet.” She slings the canvas bag onto the counter and then physically shoves Grant in May’s direction. He almost trips over his own shoelaces. “Grant Ward, meet Melinda May. She runs some sort of, I don’t know, research department thing that— Oh my god, did you make seven-layer chili dip?”

May chuckles and shakes her head before extending a hand. “I’m the—”

“Chief research attorney for the complex litigation unit in our building,” Grant blurts. Her fingers twitch, almost pulling back, and he forces himself to swallow before he grips her hand. “We read a few of your transcripts in my trial advocacy classes. You were a legend, one of the best trial attorneys this state’s ever—”

“That was a long time ago,” May interrupts, releasing his hand. Grant starts to apologize but she steps away too quickly; by the time he’s recovered, she’s launched into a complicated series of instructions about reheating the mysterious dip she brought along. He picks up his beer and watches her back, trying for a moment to imagine why a talented attorney would leave the courtroom for—

“I, uh, brought beer,” another voice comments, and Grant glances over his shoulder to see Leo Fitz standing awkwardly in the doorway. He’s pretty sure Skye misses his greeting—it’s hard to even hear Leo over the sound of salsa-related squealing—and Simmons is presently shuffling cards like a Vegas dealer. 

He looks at the bottle in his hand, helps himself to a hungry swig, and then turns around to smile at the latest addition. “Hey,” he greets, and Leo jumps a little in what Grant assumes is surprise. He’s wearing a too-big sweater over relatively skinny jeans. Grant wonders for a half-second whether he’s borrowed the sweater from someone else in his life; he then stomps on the thought and grinds his heel down on it, like killing a spider in the bathroom. “Skye’s obsessing about food, as usual—”

“I heard that, king of the poopy party-poopers.”

“—but I can shove your beer in the fridge, if you want.”

“I don’t know if anyone even likes it,” Leo admits, toeing off his shoes. “The invitation said to bring your own drinks or ‘risk the rubbing alcohol in the freezer.’”

“You’re still not buying better vodka?” May demands. When Grant glances back at her, she’s resting her hands on her hips.

Skye snorts. “Like you were complaining at our last girls’ night.”

The two of them start bantering, and Grant seriously wonders if he’s hallucinating, watching _the_ Melinda May bicker with a member of the county’s IT staff. He’s thinking about pinching himself when someone clears his throat. He pulls his attention away from the two women to see Leo still standing there, the six-pack of craft beer clutched in one of his hands. They’re deft hands, like Simmons’s. Grant spends a beat too long wondering what they’ll look like shuffling cards before he manages to ask, “I didn’t know you knew Skye at all.”

“I don’t,” Leo replies, shrugging slightly. “At least, I mean, not really. But after we ran into each other in the coffee shop a few weeks ago, we got to talking. Simmons’s gone to a few of Skye’s ‘girls’ nights,’ though, so I thought I might as well come along to play poker and see what all the fuss was about.”

“It’s too bad you never came around when Skye was in the old place,” Simmons comments off-handedly. She glides between them, helping herself to Leo’s six pack. She pulls out two bottles, hands one to her fellow clerk, and then heads to the fridge. “Garden level in this gorgeous old building, with a fireplace and that _tub_!”

Leo rolls his eyes. “You’ve gone on about the tub a thousand times.”

“It had clawed feet.”

“Clawed feet and about a hundred years of other people’s naked bodies writhing around in it, from what you told me.” Simmons twists to scowl at him, but Leo casts his eyes in Grant’s direction. Grant expects it to be a half-second glance, but his gaze catches and lingers. “I’m all for old buildings from the outside, but give me the modern amenities, please.”

Simmons heaves a sigh. “You need to be more romantic.”.

“I can be romantic in a house with modern heating and water that only comes out rusty when I’m just back from holiday,” Leo retorts. Simmons rolls her eyes and steals a slice of cheese from one of Skye’s snack plates. “She romanticizes it, now,” he explains to Grant, “but all I’ve ever heard about Skye’s girls’ nights is how the flat was freezing in the winter. Like something out of an Austen novel.”

Grant allows himself one small grin. “Austen?” he repeats.

“Oh, you know. The plight of the single woman, alone against the cruelties of the world.” Leo smiles brighter than Grant expects, so filled with absolute, genuine warmth that Grant swears he can feel it in his toes. He swigs his beer to distract himself. “At least, that’s how Simmons always put it.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Grant can see Simmons roll her eyes again. “And yet you’re here,” he points out, “and voluntarily subjecting yourself to all that estrogen.”

Leo ducks his head for a half-second, and Grant watches as a slight pink flush starts climbing into the softest part of his face. “Well, like I said, Skye and I discovered we have quite a few things in common.”

“Meaning you share the same thoroughly questionable taste in men,” Simmons intones.

Grant thinks perhaps it’s meant to be a mutter, trapped under her breath or grumbled into her beer, but the damage is unmistakable. Skye stops crunching on crackers, May freezes with her fingers on a cheese cube, and red blooms all over Leo’s face. “We have a great many things in common, thank you,” he sputters, his fingers tightening around his unopened beer bottle. “We appreciate coffee drinks. Advanced technology. Decent books—”

“I’m not even sure Skye knows how to read,” May mutters.

“—and better movies. We spent a half-hour talking about the latest iPhone designs, the other day, so how that translates to our only thing in common being—that other thing, it—”

“I get it,” Grant interrupts, holding up his hands. He tries to keep his voice carefully neutral, but he hears the amusement inching its way in. He can’t help it, really; the red-faced rambling is strangely endearing, even if he’s certain that it’ll just encourage Skye’s misguided matchmaking. “I only wish I had the ‘common ground’ excuse to explain why I spend so much time with Skye.”

“ _Tell_ me about it,” Skye announces. She drapes herself over Grant’s shoulder, leaning in close, and Grant rolls his eyes as he attempts to shrug her off. “And trust me when I say that our taste in men is _totally_ different. I mean, I personally like them all big, mean, muscly, he’s into the smart, socially-awkward type.” She taps a finger against her lips for a moment, but Grant can see the smile in her eyes. “Actually, now that I think of it, they’re all kind of like—”

“Don’t you have a poker table to set up?” Grant demands. He grinds out every word from between clenched teeth.

“Ooh, that’s our job!” Simmons announces. Before Grant can blink, she loops an arm in Leo’s and drags him—and his still-unopened beer—off toward the poker table. Leo waves weakly, but then Simmons’s comment about distributing the chips for the first hand turns immediately into an argument about proper table set-up.

May shakes her head. “I don’t know why we let them out in public,” she says, and then heads off to the table after them. 

Skye waits until they’re most of the way across the room to cackle like a bad Halloween witch. Grant tries to shove her off his shoulder, but she pushes away from him and then dances around the kitchen like an over-excited three-year-old. “This is _awesome_.”

Grant sighs. “I knew it wasn’t just poker.”

“Uh, it’s poker, but with a side of getting you laid.” She points a finger at him and turns it in a few slow circles. “Because, my friend, I’m going to get you L-A-I-D _laid_.”

“I like how you assume that just because I have a conversation with someone, I want to sleep with him.”

“When you have a conversation with someone? No.” She picks up a beer off the counter—Grant can’t remember her even dragging one out of the fridge, proof he was maybe a bit too engrossed in his conversation about girls’ nights and claw-footed bathtubs—and points the neck at him. “If you’re even remotely civil with somebody, you’re ready to exchange friendship bracelets. If you flirt awkwardly and check out his ass in a coffee shop, you at least want to stick your tongue down his throat.”

“Charming.”

“But if you seek him out, have a conversation with him, and then save him from his own self-destructive rambling?” She pauses to swig her beer and toss her hair over her shoulder. “I should really start shopping online for a bridesmaid’s dress tonight.”

Grant huffs a breath and shakes his head at her. “You have no idea how wrong you are.”

“And you have _no_ idea how much your little boyfriend over there likes muscles,” Skye retorts, and she pats him on the forearm before heading for the poker table.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A posting schedule through the end of January can be found [here.](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/66887534008/cbhh-is-the-cardboard-hedgehog-and-other)
> 
> Oh, and PS: HugeAlienPie wrote an amazing MPU story called [Pride Goeth](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1044739). It is my favorite thing, I routinely reread it and lose my mind at its greatness, and now, you may read it too.


	3. The Punishment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant is interrupted while following some fairly exacting directions.
> 
> (He hates you so much, Skye.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to Jen and saranoh, who at this point are waking up to a new story every Wednesday morning--and all without complaint.

“Are you lurking in the hallway for a reason?” Melinda May asks, and Grant Ward nearly trips as he spins around to face her.

She’s wearing a perfect black suit, one that barely crinkles when she rests her hands on her hips and stares him down. He’s never seen her practice live—his knowledge of Special Prosecutor May comes mostly from urban legend, classmates, and YouTube videos of when she used to teach trial advocacy workshops—but he knows immediately that he would never want to face her in court. He’s not even sure he wants to face her here, in the mostly-empty third-floor hallway.

She raises her eyebrows, and Grant forces a smile. 

“I got a little lost,” he says, nodding to the directory that hangs next to the elevators. “I’m on my way to—”

“The juvenile clerk’s office?” May prompts.

Grant feels the very rims of his ears start to burn. “You won’t believe that I was looking for Skye and pushed the wrong elevator button, will you?”

“No.”

He raises a hand to rub his temple. “Of course not,” he replies, but May’s face stays perfectly neutral. He’d known from the moment that he’d woken up to a text that simply read _I figured out your punishment_ that his day’d turn into some sort of Orwellian nightmare.

Three text-messages, five e-mails, and a text-to-voice message on the intern office’s voicemail later, he’s pretty disappointed that he’d been right all along.

May quirks her eyebrows. Grant feels immediately like the elementary school student dragged into the principal’s office for shooting spitballs during math class. He wonders whether May considered that as a career option after she left prosecution. “It’s a really long story,” he finally says.

“I have time.” Something in her tone sounds almost amused. He really hopes that Skye didn’t drag her into this, too.

“Skye likes to make up these stupid bets,” he explains, waving a hand like that clears up the whole ordeal. May’s lips twitch into something very much like a smile. He tries to imagine the unflappable Melinda May agreeing to one of Skye’s ridiculous wagers and fails miserably. “Anyway, we bet a year ago that she’d never find a coffee place willing to make her an extra-large, no foam, no whip, iced soy latte with three shots of chocolate and minus the espresso. And for a year, every barista in the county’s looked at her like she’s crazy and refused.”

May’s face pinches, and he watches as she mentally processes the mysterious drink order. “Wouldn’t she just be asking for a chocolate soy milk on ice?”

“Exactly,” Grant returns, and this time, she definitely smiles. “The last time she asked for one at the place across the street, I thought the teenager working behind the counter was going to reach over and strangle her.” He shakes his head. “Yesterday morning, her wish was apparently Starbucks’s command.”

“Meaning she got her chocolate soy milk?”

“Trenta-sized, and with those chocolate flakes on top.” May snorts a sound that he thinks might qualify as her version of a laugh. “And now, I’m on the hook for a ‘punishment.’”

And Grant’s suddenly _sure_ that May’s suffered through at least one of Skye’s ridiculous bets, because the woman immediately grins. She presses her lips into a tight line, attempting to hide it, but Grant sees the way it crinkles the fine lines around her eyes. “So, you’re here for that boy,” she guesses.

“I think that’s kind of oversimplifying—” he starts, but she raises her eyebrows just a half-degree higher than last time and the words still in his chest. He releases a breath, discovering too late that it sounds mostly like a guilty sigh. “Skye wants me to talk to ‘that boy,’ yes,” he answers. “I need to offer to bring him and Jemma Simmons whatever they want for lunch, totally free of charge.”

May rolls her lips together to hide a second smile. Grant wishes he could say he was solely responsible for making one of his professional idols almost laugh. “Have you ever considered that you need better friends?” she asks after a few seconds.

“Daily.”

She actually chuckles at him, this time, her hands falling away from her sides so she can come up and clasp him on the upper arm. She’s strong enough that he almost flinches. “Good luck,” she says before heading toward the elevators.

“Yeah,” he mutters, and stays firmly rooted to that spot on the hallway floor until she’s stepped into the elevator car, pushed the button for her destination, and disappeared entirely.

Simmons and Fitz request ridiculously complicated special-order sandwiches from Jimmy John’s and enormous milkshakes from a tiny ice cream shop that’s all the way on the opposite side of town. Since Grant’s due in court immediately after his lunch hour, he eats his turkey sandwich in the car. He also glops mayonnaise and avocado spread on his tie, but that probably surprises no one.

He finds some solace in the way Leo lights up at the first taste of his ridiculous Junior Mint milkshake, but Chief Assistant District Attorney Hill’s suspicious raised eyebrow at the green splotch on his tie shoots that into the ground.

When he leaves work at five fifteen, his ruined tie in his pocket and his mood about as sour as whatever dead-or-dying disaster lives in the break room fridge, he finds Skye sitting on the bench outside the building’s back doors. She’s wearing a pink dress with cowboy boots and sipping a—

“I would’ve sent you to pick up their shakes if I knew you were going,” he grumbles.

“Oh, shut up,” she returns, and reaches into the paper bag that’s sitting next to her. There’s another shake waiting, with a straw and everything, and she shoves it in his direction. “Good work today, Mister I-Might-Eventually-Get-Laid.”

He drops onto the bench. “Bringing him a Club Lulu with every non-standard vegetable on the menu is not going to get me laid,” he points out before taking a greedy gulp of his milkshake. It’s strawberry, and because that’s his favorite flavor, he decides to murder Skye quickly instead of letting her suffer.

He leans his head back against the white-washed stone while Skye swings her legs idly. “Besides,” she says conversationally, “Melinda said she’ll totally talk to Leo if you ask nicely. Something about it being more humane than watching you blush your way through every conversation.”

He snaps his head toward her so quickly that he almost gives himself whiplash. “Melinda May did not say that,” he informs her. She shrugs and sips her shake. “Skye, she didn’t say that. Right?”

“You’d have to ask her,” Skye replies, and laughs when he elbows her nearly off the bench.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, or Thursday to all my readers! On my Thanksgiving Day, I am extremely grateful for the continued support of all of my Motion Practitioners. I keep waiting for a day where people are sick of this crazy series of mine, but it never arrives.


	4. The Change in Topic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant attempts to talk about work and ends up talking about something very different instead.
> 
> (This is your fault, Skye.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continued thanks to Jen and saranoh, who are collectively the greatest thing since sliced bread.

“I don’t mind working with him,” Grant Ward promises. He pours a splash of canola oil into the bottom of the pot, then lets Skye elbow him out of the way so she can add more. “He’s talented, and legal writing isn’t exactly my strong suit.”

“Then what the hell’s your problem?” Skye asks. She drops a couple popcorn kernels into the dutch oven before closing it; when Grant stays quiet for what he assumes is just a little too long, she glances at him over her shoulder. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“If Tony Stark’s as lawyer-brilliant as he is engineer-brilliant—which according to his Wikipedia page, he totally is—why don’t you want to work with him?”

Grant sighs and reaches for his beer. “I thought you promised me ten minutes of ‘judgment-free bitching’ before movie night.”

“Because I thought you’d be lamenting about your lack of progress on the Fitz front, not your lame-ass work drama,” she retorts, and helps herself to a sip of his beer once he’s pulled it away from his lips.

He rolls his eyes. “You have a one-track mind.”

“And yet which one of us regularly has locomotives pulling into Grand Central Station?” she snipes back.

He allows her a glimpse of his full-body shudder as she flounces over to set up the surround sound, and she flips him off before she starts tinkering. He hates to admit it, but Skye’s as naturally talented with technology as Stark is with oral argument or Simmons with remembering complicated procedural rules in her head. He’s almost a little jealous, since most of his talents begin and end with out-sweating the other members of his boxing class at the YMCA and intimidating traffic defendants when he helps out with Barton’s docket.

Darcy Lewis now calls him “grumpy cat’s less cuddly cousin.” He’s not even sure what that means.

The first couple corn kernels pop in rapid succession, and he dumps in the rest as Simmons and May burst through the door. Simmons chatters a mile a minute, almost like a chipmunk on overdrive, and May smiles politely. Grant’s tried to follow Simmons’s more animated stories in the past, but he’s always lost himself in the flutter of her hands and her thick accent.

Skye, on the other hand, just steps right into the middle of the conversation and reaches over to hug her friend around the shoulders. “I have beer, I’m making popcorn—”

“Actually, I’m making popcorn,” he points out.

She screws up her face at him. “—and Ward’s totally in his best Oscar the Grouch mode because work today was shitty.”

“You mean the D.A.’s office isn’t Shangri-La?” May asks, and Grant thinks he catches her smiling as she starts to unload a bag of snacks onto the coffee table.

Simmons frowns hard enough that it creases her brow and pushes out her lower lip. “What happened?”

Grant tries not to roll his eyes. “Nothing happened,” he promises. He shakes up the pot for a few seconds, but to no effect. When he glances over, she’s staring at him. “Just a long day.”

“With _Stark_ ,” Skye clarifies. The _k_ rattles like a snare drum as she hands Simmons a beer—and, thankfully, opens a second for herself. She hoists herself up onto the counter and starts swinging her legs. “Turns out one of the best attorneys in the state is kind of a pill to work with.”

“First, I doubt he’s even in the top fifty,” Grant returns. Across the room, May lets out a sound like a snort of laughter. He grits his teeth and tries to force a tiny smile as he turns back to the popcorn. “And second, I never said he was a pill.”

“Right. You just said he can’t cite to save his life, he’s weirdly protective of his files, he barks at Paprika—”

“Pepper,” Grant and Simmons both correct her.

Skye rolls her eyes. “My point is,” she stresses, pointing the neck of her beer bottle at him, “you’re pissy because Stark refuses to stroke your delicate man-ego the way your dreamboat Phil Coulson does.”

Grant snaps his head back toward her just in time to watch Simmons’s eyes widen to twice their size. “No,” he says firmly while Skye grins like the cat who just caught and carefully fileted the canary before serving it with truffle butter. “Phil Coulson is intellectually stimulating. One of his articles appeared in my legal ethics books, and I like that he frames prosecutorial misconduct as evolving concept instead of a static one.”

“You know I stop listening when you purposely say things I don’t understand, right?” Skye asks. Next to her, Simmons starts to very slowly close her parted lips. “Because otherwise, you keep doing it just so you can feel smart, and that’s _annoying_.”

“I’m just trying to explain that I don’t have a crush,” he insists.

“You can have a crush if you want,” May says. When Grant glances over his shoulder, he discovers her leaning against the end of the counter. She stops twisting the lid to her water bottle to shrug. “Phil Coulson’s practically married. You’d have better luck splitting up Stark and Banner.”

“Oh, don’t split up Mister Stark and Doctor Banner!” Simmons exclaims. She clutches her beer bottle with both hands and sends Grant this wide-eyed, lovelorn look. He almost steps back just to avoid the full force of her pout. “Doctor Banner is one of the greatest child welfare attorneys I’ve ever met, and Mister Stark is so lovely.”

May narrows her eyes. “Are we talking about the same Tony Stark?”

“Their story is so inspiring. The way he and Doctor Banner discovered each other, falling in love against all possible odds . . . ” She sighs like they’re discussing the plot of the latest Nicholas Sparks novel. Grant glances over at May, who shrugs. “Never mind their son, who I hear is on his way to being _quite_ the little heartbreaker,” Simmons adds, tipping her bottle in Grant’s direction before helping herself to a swig.

Skye’s legs abruptly stop swinging. “Isn’t their kid, like, twelve?”

Simmons’s cheeks flush a strange shade of pink. “I said he’s on his way,” she defends, and starts picking at the label on her beer. “He’s not one now. That’d be completely weird and not at all the kind of thing well-reasoned adults wonder about primary school children.” She raises her eyes meekly and glances around the room. “Right?”

The kitchen falls completely silent save for the occasional random snap of a corn kernel popping open.

“I’m going to go finish with the surround sound now,” Skye decides. She hops off the counter, snagging her beer with one hand and the arm of Simmons’s cardigan with the other. Simmons resists for a half-second, her feet almost rooted to the spot, then finally, reluctantly follows.

Grant rolls his eyes at the two of them, dumping the popcorn into Skye’s outrageously oversized serving bowl. It’s a massive striped thing she usually tucks in the middle of her crossed legs, hoarding it like a dragon hoards gold. Or, Grant thinks to himself, like Stark hoarded the enormous box of transcripts that’d arrived at the DA’s office that morning. Grant’d offered to help him unpack some of it, but Stark’d just glowered and handed him a citation guide. He’d spent the whole afternoon correcting case name abbreviations and deleting errant commas.

He wanted to like Tony Stark, but the guy kept turning it into a Herculean task.

“I think that’s enough salt,” a voice suddenly comments, and Grant jerks out of his own thoughts just in time to watch May lift the bowl off the counter and walk away with it.

He snorts a little at her back, beer bottle in hand, and arrives at the couch as the surround sound flares into booming life. Skye mashes the mute button and crawls out of the entertainment center without slamming her head into anything. “Remind me to stop upgrading every six months,” she grumbles as she brushes dust out her hair.

“And miss your tirades about how Bose products are overpriced and still the best on the market? Never.” She elbows Grant as she heads to flop next to Simmons on the couch. He tries to sit down, but she throws a pillow in the last empty spot. May, who’s claimed Skye’s enormous recliner, smiles around a few kernels of popcorn. “Is this another tactic?” he asks as he heads toward the love seat.

“To protect myself from having to sit next to your cranky ass? Absolutely.” She kicks her feet up onto the coffee table. He frowns at her, and for the first half-second or so, she frowns right back. Then, suddenly, her expression starts to soften. By the time Grant’s situated himself in the corner of the loveseat, she looks almost surprised. “You do know Fitz isn’t coming tonight, right?” she asks.

He nearly chokes on a swallow of beer. “Excuse me?”

“Yeah, he texted me Wednesday. One of his college friends is getting married in Arizona this weekend.”

“New Mexico,” Simmons corrects as she bites off the end of a twizzler. 

Skye waves a hand. “Hot, sandy, no beaches, same thing.” She starts to reach for the remote and, presumably, start the movie, but then she freezes. Her head tilts in Grant’s direction, and within seconds, her lips are quirking into a sharp, dangerous smile. “You thought I wanted you to share the love seat,” she says.

He rolls his eyes. “Play the movie.”

“No, seriously,” she presses. He leans in to grab the remote, so she yanks it out of his reach and shoves it between couch cushions. “You thought I was going to corner you into some close-quarters cuddling with your little boyfriend and didn’t even question it.” 

Grant swears that he can see May smirking around the mouth of her beer bottle. Simmons, on the other hand, just frowns. “Boyfriend?”

Skye flashes her a predatory grin. “Ward totally has a Fitz thing.”

“I do not—” he starts to protest, but then Simmons releases a high-pitched noise that resembles a squeal. He heaves a sigh as she clasps her hands to her chest. “I do _not_ have a Fitz thing,” he stresses, holding up his hands. “Skye wants me to have a Fitz thing, but I—”

“Is that why you kept looking all bashful and awkward when he talked about milkshakes being too thick to suck easily?” Simmons immediately asks. In the recliner, May jerks like she’s almost snorted her beer. Grant grits his teeth while Skye cackles. “Because he really didn’t mean it sexually. I mean, he asked me later whether I thought you thought it was sexual, because of course you always worry when you think the attractive young man you keep pretending not to fancy might’ve misunderstood what you meant—”

“He fancies Ward?” Skye blurts.

“—but I assured him that you probably had more sense than to think someone as shy and generally bad at finding men who are _remotely_ good for him as Fitz was actually flirting.” Simmons shakes her head. “Not that it seemed to matter to him, and he didn’t _touch_ his milkshake, because—”

“Simmons,” Grant interrupts, and she abruptly clamps her mouth shut. Another pink flush rolls across her face as she presses her lips together, but she watches him expectantly. Across the room, May’s recovered from her aborted spit-take enough to casually sip her beer with the usual practiced disinterest. 

Skye, because she’s Skye, grins like a lunatic.

He sighs and closes his eyes long enough to pinch the bridge of his nose. When he surveys the room again a few seconds later, though, all three women are still staring him down.

“I don’t suppose we can just watch the movie and forget this conversation ever happened,” he says.

“Uh, not even _Star Wars_ beats watching you explain your crush to these two,” Skye retorts, and Grant rolls his eyes as she crunches down on a handful of popcorn.


	5. The Sushi Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant is roped into a group sushi night that features an unexpected ending.
> 
> (He will eventually stop you from colluding with others, Skye.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, as always, to the world's greatest betas: Jen and saranoh.

“I’m only saying that if you take this bill at face value, grandparents end up with superior rights during child welfare proceedings,” Jemma Simmons says, her phone dangling from one hand while an almost-untouched beer dangles from the other. “And given that it conflicts with the rest of the child welfare code, I don’t see—”

“Just because you think it conflicts with the code doesn’t mean it actually does,” Leo Fitz interrupts. A half-eaten piece of sushi dangles from his chopsticks as he gestures at Simmons. “There’s already implicit rights for kin—and non-related kin, according to that case that just came down from the appellate court—and—”

“Oh, the logic in that case was _complete_ bollocks! You might as well argue that as long as you’ve met the child, you become an interested—”

“I never said the logic was sound, but we’re bound to follow it until the state supreme court says differently and—”

“‘Bound to follow it,’ do you even listen to yourself, you sound like a bloody appellate court judge!”

Leo jumps in again with a complicated child welfare comeback, and Grant glances at the woman next to him. Skye, who’s eaten more sushi than Grant and the two clerks combined and who’s polished off three glasses of sake, shrugs and helps herself to another piece of their dragon roll

Grant sighs.

In retrospect, he should’ve known Skye’s promise of congratulatory sushi to celebrate his first court appearance was, like all of Skye’s promises, too good to be true. Because five minutes after he’d shown up, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and ready to gorge himself on salmon rolls, Skye’d walked in with the already-arguing Fitz-Simmons brain trust.

She’d mouthed _sorry_ , but her grin’d betrayed her. What’s worse, Leo’s jeans hugged every inch of his legs and his paper-thin cardigan did _nothing_ to protect him against the air conditioning vent above their table.

If you catch Grant’s meaning.

He’d tried to ask how the two clerks even managed to earn an invitation—Skye’d rolled her eyes at the question, almost as though inviting non-friends to congratulatory dinners was a totally normal thing to do—but Leo and Simmons’d just kept bickering.

In what is apparently another language, because their conversation makes about as much sense as the line of French instructions on his shampoo bottle.

He shoves another chunk of sushi into his mouth.

“What do you think?” Simmons suddenly asks, and Grant stops chewing to look at her. She’s dropping more sushi onto her plate, her phone nowhere to be seen; when he fails to immediately come up with an answer, she cocks her head to one side. “Really, Ward, Senate Bill 27-B is an important measure. You work in the district attorney’s office. You should know about it.”

“As far as she’s concerned, everyone should know about it,” Leo mumbles. Simmons pokes him with the back ends of her chopsticks, and Grant swallows a little too hard when the other man squirms in his chair.

He washes down the mostly-unchewed sushi with a big swallow of beer before he shrugs. “Child welfare’s not really my area of expertise. I’m more a criminal law guy.” Leo and Simmons immediately glance at one another, matching smiles crossing their faces. He frowns. “What?”

“It’s just that everyone says that until their rotation with Doctor Banner,” Simmons replies. She shrugs as she pushes her sushi into a puddle of soy sauce. “Then, they do the rounds—”

“Meet Judge Smithe,” Leo chimes in.

“—see a few hearings, help with some of the community initiatives, meet some of the kids.” Simmons flashes Grant a sympathetic smile. “You’ll be converted eventually.”

“Wait,” Skye breaks in. When Grant glances over at her, she’s frowning. “A couple weeks with Bruce—Doctor Banner, whatever—and suddenly all these hardened criminal law interns are fluffy bunnies about some little kids? That actually _works_?” Leo raises his eyebrows at Simmons, who rolls her lips together. They take almost synchronized sips of their beer, and Grant watches Skye’s eyes narrow. “Guys?”

“Strictly speaking, it hasn’t worked _yet_ , no,” Simmons explains with a wave of her chopsticks.

“But statistically, it’s really only a matter of time until he convinces _someone_ to love juvenile law,” Leo adds. He flushes red when Skye laughs, and Grant tries very hard not to smile when the other man ducks his head in embarrassment.

The silence drags on for a couple seconds too long, leaving them no choice but to chase errant grains of rice around their plates and sip their beers, and Grant finally shrugs. “So tell me about the bill,” he says. Simmons’s head jerks up, but not as quickly as Leo’s; Grant tries very hard to believe the expression there is _surprise_ instead of _constrained delight_. “Banner’ll have a hard time with me—”

“Doesn’t everybody?” Skye intones, leaning away when Grant tries to elbow her.

“—but maybe you can start the conversion early.” The corners of Leo’s mouth twitch into something close to a grin, and Grant can’t stop his own smile. “If Senate Bill 27-B really is all that important.”

“Oh, it _is_ ,” Simmons promises. Beside her, Leo rolls his eyes and drags another piece of sushi through a puddle of soy sauce. Grant almost thinks that the other man’s surrendered the conversation entirely to his fellow clerk—until Simmons nudges his shoulder so hard that he splatters brown sauce on the table cloth. “And that is precisely why Fitz is going to tell you everything he knows about it, start to finish.”

Leo scowls at her. “I’m not the one who’s threatened to ‘take to the streets in protest’ if the bloody thing’s signed.”

“Which is exactly why you should tell Ward about it while the rest of us eat our sushi and mind our own business!” Simmons retorts smoothly, and all with a charming smile.

Senate Bill 27-B, Grant finds out over the next twenty minutes, is a retooled version of a grandparents’ rights bill that the state legislature’s tried to pass for the last three years running. It’s all very technical and complicated, drawing on statutes that Grant’s never even heard of, but Leo’s whole face lights up when he explains it. His passion for the bill transforms slowly into his love of his grandparents in Scotland, and by the time Skye actually picks up the check for dinner, Grant’s lost in the way Leo glows when he’s happy.

It’s a crisp early-summer night outside, a little cool and breezy, and the clerks serge ahead of him and Skye on the sidewalk. A half-block into their long walk to the one free surge lot in the whole of their “downtown,” Skye steps into his personal space and presses her shoulder against his arm. “You might actually get into his pants on your own merits, you know.”

He rolls his eyes. “You invited them on purpose.”

“No, I invited _Fitz_ on purpose. Simmons overheard, and I’m not enough of a total jerk to just _not_ invite her.” He raises an eyebrow at her, and she scowls. “I’m not!” 

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he retorts, and then grins when she punches him in the arm.

It’s three blocks of walking later, filled with glowing white streetlights and the gentle sound of their collective laughter echoing into the evening sky that Simmons grabs Leo’s arm and pulls him violently off course. Leo squeaks and protests loudly enough that strangers ahead of them turn around, but his colleague ignores him. By the time he and Skye catch up, Simmons’s face is practically pressed against the glass window outside a local dive bar and—

“No,” Leo says firmly, crossing his arms.

“You _promised_ ,” Simmons informs him. She turns around, curls flying, and glares at him. “You said that the next time we were out, I could find a bar with karaoke—”

“Karaoke?” Skye echoes. She glances at Grant, and he shrugs.

“—and you’d get up and _actually_ sing with me.” When Leo casts his eyes down at the sidewalk, tips of his ears reddening, Simmons shoves her hands on her hips. “And since I’ve suffered through every season of Doctor Who to date—”

“Technically, you’ve only seen new Who,” Leo mutters.

“—the David Tennant series about the dead little boy, and that awful show with the shirtless teenage werewolves—”

“Uh, _Teen Wolf_ is practically high cinema,” Skye informs them. 

“—you can come into a bar, have a pint, and _finally_ sing!”

Simmons finishes her argument with the kind of pointed glare that pins Leo in place, and the two of them stare at each other before the latter finally sighs. “For the record,” he says, his tone half-grumbling, “I was drunk when I promised that and don’t remember it.”

Simmons shrugs at him. “That’s never an excuse for reneging on a promise.”

“Says the woman who once promised to help me find a better hair product but—” Grant’s certain there’s more to that story, but when Leo glances over and discovers that both he _and_ Skye are listening to the conversation, his whole face flares red. Grant wonders exactly how low that flush spreads over his neck and chest. “Uh. Never mind.”

“Well, I think it sounds like fun,” Skye reports, and the sudden spark in her eye makes Grant’s blood run cold. He tries to side-step away from her, but she reaches out and deftly snags the side of his t-shirt. “We’re in.”

“ _We_ are not in anything,” Grant retorts.

Leo nods. “Precisely.”

“Oh no, _we_ are definitely in,” Skye repeats, this time with twice the emphasis. When Grant starts to protest again, her expression flashes dark and dangerous. He spends about three seconds imagining all the different ways she could punish him for leaving before he sighs. She grins and claps him on the shoulder. “I’ll buy the first round.”

“See, Fitz?” Simmons chirps, beaming. “Free beer!” And when Leo attempts to protest again, Simmons grabs him by the sleeve of his cardigan and drags him into the bar.

In the end, Grant drinks a lot of free beer.

And in the morning, he discovers that Skye’s uploaded a video of him and Leo singing Elton John’s “Rocket Man” to YouTube.


	6. The Old Bait and Switch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant discovers that the Saturday plans he made are not the Saturday plans he's about to get.
> 
> (He's learning not to trust you, Skye.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, endless thanks to my magnificent betas, Jen and saranoh. In a few months, I will be able to see I've seen a movie with each of the. (Right now, Jen is winning the movie count.)

“Oh, good, you must be early, too!” a familiar voice says, and Grant Ward feels his stomach twist itself into a knot.

The big Suffolk County movie theater is rarely packed on a Saturday afternoon, and today is no exception; trapped in the lull between fun spring-break movies and summer blockbusters, it feels more like a tomb than a theater. Grant’s spent the last ten minutes watching a bunch of teenage concession stand workers share their junior prom pictures while waiting for Skye to show up and drag him to some science fiction train wreck.

He can’t stand science fiction movies. Worse, he can’t stand that Skye exploits his hatred of science fiction movies.

And worst of all, he can’t stand the cold hand of dread that curls its fingers around his belly when he swivels around and—

“I know it’s a bit lame, but Jemma says you can’t watch sci-fi without the proper t-shirt, and this was the only one that wasn’t in the wash.” Leo Fitz gestures to the big blue phone box in the middle of his shirt, and Grant can’t help staring. He wears it with a cream-colored cardigan and a pair of worn jeans. He looks about the same age as the teenagers with their junior prom pictures, right down to his battered sneakers. “And yes, it’s not _technically_ the right subgenre, but—”

“The tigress, right?” Grant blurts without really thinking about it. Leo stops mid-sentence and blinks exactly once before his face collapses into complete confusion. Grant gestures to the shirt. “The blue box. From that British show, with the crazy guy and the redhead, and—”

Leo laughs. “Amy’s not been the Doctor’s companion for a season now,” he says, “but— ” He stops again, his lips pressing tightly together as his face flushes a color just shy of pink, and Grant suddenly realizes that he’s staring blankly at the other man. He smiles tightly, and Leo immediately mirrors the expression. Grant considers cursing Darcy Lewis’s habit of only half-explaining her weird obsessions, but all he can really focus on is how long and lean Leo looks in his slouchy jeans.

They end up staring at one another for a few seconds before Leo crosses his arms. “So,” he says, dragging the word into three or four syllables, “are we just waiting on Jemma, then?”

“I’m waiting for Skye,” Grant replies immediately. Leo frowns, his brow furrowing, and the feeling of dread claws its way back into the softest part of Grant’s stomach. He sighs. “Lemme guess: you had no idea Skye was coming.”

Leo shrugs slightly. “When I asked this morning, Jemma said she needed to wash her hair. And that sounded ridiculous, of course, but then Jemma said that girls sometimes need to do that. Something about splitting ends being caused by an improper water-to-conditioner ratio.” When Grant reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose, Leo rolls his lips together. “Did Skye not mention that we’d be here?”

Grant forces a tiny smile. “Not exactly,” he admits, but that’s not the truth. No, the truth is that Skye’d spent the better part of a week _begging_ him to catch a Saturday matinee of this movie until her whining eroded away his rough spots like a pebble at the bottom of a lake. He’d half-suspected some sort of trickery—last time he’d agreed to see a movie with her, she’d pulled a last minute bait-and-switch and he’d suffered through the first installment of _The Hobbit_ —but this—

“If you’d rather,” Leo starts to say, and Grant jerks out of his thoughts just in time to watch Leo gesture toward the nearest door, “I can go. I mean, I already saw it on opening night, and if you and Skye had this planned, I wouldn’t—”

“I don’t want you to go,” Grant cuts in, and he’s surprised at the sincerity that seeps into his voice. It apparently surprises Leo, too, because he freezes with his hand still dangling in midair. Grant drags his fingers through his hair. “That is, if you’re okay with that,” he amends, and the other man slowly lowers his hand. “Just let me call Skye and find out about her—hair.”

“And I’ll text Jemma, see if maybe she took a wrong turn again.” When Grant raises an eyebrow, Leo flashes him a wicked smile. “She’s really rubbish at directions. I bought her a Garmin for her car but she always leaves it in the house. It’s quite funny, really, one time she forgot to charge it and— Well, you have to start with why she needed it in the first place, actually, because the charging only makes sense after—”

“Can you maybe hold that thought until after I check in with Skye?” Grant asks. Not because he’s not interested in the story, but because Leo’s infectious grin and animated hand-flaps are starting to distract him away from his annoyance. As it stands, he’s not sure just listening to Skye will reignite his frustration. He wonders whether he can FaceTime with her and glare into her smug, grinning face. 

Leo flushes pink to his hairline, and Grant forgets what anger feels like altogether. “Sure,” he answers, and starts digging into his jeans to find his cell phone.

Grant forces a smile and heads straight outside, slipping past a blonde woman with wild hair and her curvy friend in a red Manchester United windbreaker as he extracts his own phone from his jacket. He almost loses his printed-out online ticket in the process, and he winds up swearing to himself as he wrestles that and his keys back where they belong.

He only realizes that Skye’s actually answered when she informs him, “That is _so_ not how you greet the woman who just set you up on the best surprise date ever.” Her voice practically oozes with self-satisfaction. Grant’s momentary feelings of amnesty fly right out the window. “I mean, the least you could do is thank us.”

“No, not ‘us!’ There’s no ‘us!’” a voice that sounds suspiciously like Jemma Simmons shouts from the background. Grant thinks he hears a cell phone chime, and it’s followed immediately by what is clearly a tussle. Somebody grunts, Skye squeaks, and then Jemma announces, “I won’t be dragged into your matchmaking shenanigans! I didn’t even know what you were up to until after I bought the tickets and wasted fourteen dollars on a third dimension I won’t get to see!”

Skye sighs down the line. “I told you, I’ll pay you back.”

“You never pay anyone back,” Grant points out.

He knows she’s listening by the way she immediately scoffs. “No, I never pay _you_ back, and that’s because you never thank me for my dedication to getting you laid. Every dollar you spend is really an investment in your happiness.”

“I’ve been investing for three years and have seen zero return.”

“Yet,” Skye retorts, and he rolls his eyes at the way she punches the _t_. “God, I can sense your disapproval from literally ten miles away, dude. That’s some serious proof you need this movie day with Fitz.” He draws in a breath to protest, but she cuts him off. “It’s a good movie. Lots of explosions and surprising parts where he might want to grab your arm.”

“He is an arm-grabber,” Jemma comments in the background. 

“See?” Skye presses. “Just suck it up and enjoy it. And who knows, maybe by the end of it he’ll end up sucking on—”

“I’m hanging up on you now,” Grant interrupts. Skye cackles loudly enough that he can still hear her when he pulls the phone away from his ear. He cancels the call and then stares at his lock screen for a few seconds. Skye’d broken his security code a few weeks earlier and changed the wallpaper to a ridiculous three-way selfie she, Leo, and Jemma’d taken at a happy hour sometime in the last couple weeks. Grant’d almost switched it back to the default it a dozen times, but something always stopped him.

He’d told himself that it was just the novelty of finally having a group of friends.

Today, he’s not sure that’s the only reason.

“Jemma says she’s come down with a bit of a flu,” Leo greets him when he walks back into the lobby. He waves his phone once in Grant’s direction, then returns to typing. “She sounded fine when I talked to her this morning, though, so I mostly blame her diet of Chipotle and Vitamin Water. Man cannot live on barbacoa tacos alone.” Grant snorts a little, but he can’t help smiling as he watches the other man finish up his text. “The good news is, she gave me her cinema rewards card and I think she’s got a free extra-large tub of popcorn on it, so we can—”

He raises his head as he speaks, and suddenly, there they are: two acquaintances, forced together by their nosy friends and about to see a movie Grant’s spent all week dreading. They stare at one another like they’ve never really stopped to _look_ before, Leo’s eyes wide enough to trip into and his lips parted, and Grant feels himself swallow.

Neither of them says a word.

“I talked to Skye,” he finally forces out, and Leo presses his lips into a thin line. “She’s, uh, definitely doing her hair. It involved lavender and mint, I think. I stopped listening halfway through.”

When Grant smiles, he’s seized with a momentary fear that it’ll come off wrong—forced or overly-polite, the smile of a lawyer trying to keep his secrets close to his chest—but Leo grins back at him hard enough that his entire face lights up. The knot in Grant’s stomach immediately releases into something warm and not altogether unwelcome. “We don’t have to share the popcorn, then,” Leo declares, and then tucks his phone back in his pocket.

Grant chuckles a little and shakes his head. “I guess not,” he agrees, and gestures toward concessions.

“And it wasn’t the Garmin that Jemma forgot to charge, it was her cell phone,” the other man explains as they head to the counter. “Which is really funny, given that her first six months of undergrad were spent in a computer science program—if you can imagine someone like _Jemma Simmons_ in a computer science program!—and she constantly goes on about how she’s got at least as good a handle on technology as Skye . . . ” 

“You don’t say,” Grant deadpans, but then Leo flashes him a smile over his shoulder.

Suddenly, an afternoon in a horrible, arm-grabbing movie doesn’t sound half bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The newest MPU posting schedule can be found [here](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/72835167945/behold-the-mpu-posting-schedule-through-the-end).


	7. The Care and Feeding of Clerks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant offers support to a friend who really needs it.
> 
> (Now is not the time to gloat, Skye.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, as always, to Jen and saranoh, who embrace the sad and angsty chapters as much as they embrace the stupidly funny ones.
> 
> Trigger warning for the offscreen death of a non-canon elderly character. (I don't know why I am warning this. I just feel like some people don't like death in their fiction.)

“I feel ridiculous,” Grant Ward informs the shiny brass door knocker emblazoned with the number 42.

The door knocker, unsurprisingly, doesn’t answer. 

The inside hallway of Leo Fitz’s apartment building is like the rest of the complex: dated, quaint, and smelling slightly of stale cumin. Grant’d circled the building three or four times, trying desperately to convince himself that this entire ordeal was actually a good idea; once he’d parked, he’d sat in his car for a full ten minutes, staring up at the peeling brown paint and the slightly-cracked concrete stairs. 

“I’m not his fairy godmother,” he’d griped on FaceTime to Skye the night before. She immediately tossed her head back and huffed at him in what he’d assumed was disgust. “What? I’m not.”

“Uh, no, but you are his friend,” she’d retorted, and he’d rolled his eyes right back as he turned back to the legal research he’d promised Romanoff. “It’s not like he’s got mono, Ward. His grandfather _died_. In Scotland. Which is a whole ocean away.”

Grant’d used his very important Westlaw search to avoid eye contact. “He doesn’t need me to baby him.”

“But he needs it from me and Simmons? When you die alone with a cat who eats your face, I’m not even going to be sorry.” He’d shot her a dirty look, and she’d thrown up her hands. “I don’t know if you think breasts come with super healing powers, since you have so little experience with them—”

“Hilarious.”

“—but he doesn’t just need support from me and Simmons. He needs it from all his friends.” When Grant’d sighed and glanced at her, she’d narrowed her eyes directly at him. He hated her unnerving habit of staring right into the webcam. “Especially the friends who want to someday be more than friends.”

He’d rolled his eyes. “I’m not going to sleep with Leo,” he’d repeated for the thousandth time.

“Not if you can’t even show up and say ‘sorry for your Scottish loss,’” Skye’d agreed, and ended the call. 

Standing in the hallway, Grant tries to blame his decision to finally stop by Leo’s apartment on Skye and her massive guilt trips. After all, it’s either that or he admit that he misses running into Leo in the hallway. 

Or that he hates eating in the cafeteria without their usual game of “guess the meat byproduct.”

Or that he’d almost walked into a wall when he’d heard Jane Foster asking people to sign a condolence card for “the sweet little juvenile clerk—no, the male one.”

None of those things, however, really explain the container of soup he’s brought along with him.

He’s about to finally knock on the door when the lock suddenly disengages. A bolt of panic surges through him, and he’s just about to dive around the corner when the door swings open.

“Mum, I know,” Leo says, the phone cradled against his shoulder and a white trash bag clutched in his hand, “and I— Aye, Mum, I’m leaving the apartment, I’m doing just—”

His lips part, but no sound comes out. Instead, Leo freezes, his eyes trained on Grant.

Grant stares back.

On a good day, Leo looks pale and lean in an attractively breakable sort of way; today, he looks like a ghost. There are dark circles under his eyes, and his face is gaunt and drained. Even his clothes—a faded t-shirt, an unzipped hoodie, and track pants—look worn-out, and his brightly-colored socks don’t match. 

Grant’s not a sentimental person, but he’s briefly so tempted to wrap Leo up in a hug that he forgets to breathe.

“Mum, I’ll ring you back,” Leo says, and hangs up his phone.

They stand there for a second, Grant with his container of soup and Leo with his trash bag and phone, and neither one of them speaks. The overwhelming need to offer a hug ebbs and flows, and Grant eventually wets his lips. “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he says finally. 

“It was just me— my mum,” Leo falters. He reaches to scratch his neck, realizes he’s holding his phone, and drops his hand to his side. “You want to come in?”

“For a minute, sure,” Grant answers, and follows him inside.

The apartment’s hardly bigger than a studio, with one medium-sized room serving as a living room, dining area, and kitchen while a small hallway leads off to one side. Most everything’s what you’d expect from a guy in his twenties living alone—entertainment system, a bunch of movies, minimal art on the walls—but he immediately recognizes the pieces that make it Leo’s home. There’s a knitted blanket tossed on the couch and a couple complicated model planes balanced on top of the entertainment center; the sole bookcase features a photo of him and Simmons from probably six or seven years ago, and the coffee mug on the kitchen counter is shaped like Albert Einstein’s head. The whole place is cluttered without being dirty, disorganized but not claustrophobic, and Grant watches as Leo starts grabbing balled-up tissues and straightening stacks of mail.

He wants to catch his hands and tell him to stop, but he’s not sure how. 

“I, uh, I brought some soup,” he offers, and Leo stops picking up to glance in his direction. He raises the container helplessly and tries on his best “the least I could do” smile. It feels forced. “My mom always said that the first thing to go when you’re stressed is cooking, and this was easy.”

Leo presses his lips together tightly. “You made soup?”

“No, but I paid Panera very good money to let me leave with soup,” he returns. A flicker of a grin passes across Leo’s face. “Simmons said you like broccoli cheddar, but Skye thought you might be more the chicken noodle type.”

He snorts. “Skye’s right. Jemma just tries to force feed me the other because she thinks I need meat on my bones.”

“Well, since she’s wrong, it’s all the more reason for me to keep buying you the chicken noodle,” Grant retorts. Leo flushes a few shades too pink, and Grant suddenly realizes what he’s said. He diverts his gaze to the tub of soup. “Well, anyway,” he says, “I just wanted to bring you this and tell you that I’m sorry for your loss, so—”

“You could stay, you know,” Leo interrupts, effectively derailing Grant’s train of thought. Slowly, the pink flush turns completely red, and Leo glances down at the floor. “I mean, I can’t eat all that on my own, and Skye left me with the last two episodes of _Top Chef_ to watch, so you could stay and watch it with me. If, you know, you’re the type of person who likes cooking shows and chicken noodle soup.”

“I actually do,” Grant admits. When Leo raises his head, he’s smiling.

They dish out bowls of the still-hot soup, pairing it with bread and some sort of unidentifiable black tea—“It’s that or the really cheap gin Skye bought me for my last birthday,” Leo warns, and Grant forces a smile as he helps himself to a teabag—and eat together in front of the TV. The chefs toss around accusations of cheating on the quick fire challenge, but Grant barely pays attention. Because on Leo’s worn sofa, their elbows bump when they reach for their bowls or tea, and the longer they sit together, the more their knees end up pressed together.

Grant excuses himself to use the bathroom halfway through the second episode, and when he comes back, Leo’s fiddling with his phone. “Is my company that bad?” he jokes, and realizes only as he steps around the couch that all the humor’s drained out of Leo’s face. “I—”

“It’s just my mum,” Leo answers quickly. He finishes what Grant assumes is a text message, then shoves the phone back onto the coffee table. He swipes at his face with the end of his hoodie sleeve before glancing up, damp-eyed. “The granddad who died’s her dad, and it’s the first time I’ve been over here for something like that while they’re all over there, and I don’t know whether she thinks that I’m more upset than I am or that she _wants_ me to be more upset than I am, but she keeps calling and _texting_ and I can’t—”

“Hey,” Grant cuts in, and Leo immediately stops to suck in a trembling breath. He curls his hands into fists and clasps them together in his lap as Grant moves to sit down next to him. “It’s okay,” he urges, and Leo snorts at him. “Parents are weird about being with their kids when things like this happen. She’s just trying to take care of you.”

“She’s driving me totally mental,” Leo responds, but there’s no heat in it. He stares down at his hands, and Grant—

Well, Grant’s felt ridiculous since he showed up with the soup. Gently touching the middle of Leo’s back for comfort is just more of the same.

Leo stills immediately, sucking in a breath so hard and sharp that Grant almost jerks his hand away—at least, until Leo glances over and flashes him the world’s most genuine, helpless smile. Grant spreads his fingers a little and rubs a meaningless pattern on Leo’s back while Leo dips his head again.

They sit like that for full minutes, Grant idly stroking Leo’s back and swearing he can feel his heartbeat, before Leo says, “People in the D.A.’s office know you’re secretly this nice, they might talk.”

Grant snorts. “Let them talk.” When Leo sends him a suspicious glance, he shrugs. “You’re my friend, and Skye reminded me—with all her usual Skye subtlety—that part of being friends means taking care of them.”

Leo’s lips quirk into a funny little smile. He wipes his face with his sleeve one last time and slowly shakes his head. “Funny thing is, she tells me the same thing about you,” he replies, and Grant laughs as they unpause the DVR.


	8. The Intervention

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant finds himself face-to-face with a very unexpected visitor.
> 
> (He knows this is secretly your doing, Skye.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My beloved beta-readers, Jen and saranoh, are legitimately the greatest. (Yes, it is hard to come up with a novel way to thank them every chapter, but I'm trying.)

“We need to talk,” Melinda May says, and holds up an unopened bottle of expensive tequila.

Grant sighs and runs his fingers through his damp hair. It’s six p.m. on a Saturday night, and he’s technically supposed to be studying for the multistate professional responsibility exam next weekend. He’s used it as an excuse for three outings now: can’t come, studying for the exam, extra beer next time. 

Except instead of attending the county fair with Skye, Leo, and Jemma, he’s spent his afternoon and early evening doing laundry, finishing a Daniel Silva thriller, and running three of his daily five miles on the treadmill.

In the doorway, May raises an eyebrow. “Do I need to hit you with the door to come in?” she asks.

“No,” he says, and steps out of the way.

May nods at him once and steps inside, her sneakers silent on the crappy tile in his foyer. She wears jeans, a heather gray t-shirt, and a baseball cap with her ponytail pulled through the sizer in the back, although she pulls it off the second he shuts the door behind her. Her hair falls around her shoulders in messy waves, damp around the hairline. Any questions about it die in the back of his mouth when she glances over his shoulder at the treadmill, which still displays his run time and current distance.

Her eyes flick back to him, and he swallows. “Am I interrupting?”

“Not really,” he admits. She nods again and walks the rest of the way into his living room. His place is small, a starter apartment on the second floor, and most his furniture is cheap and well-worn. After a few seconds, though, she disappears into the kitchen. When he follows, it’s just in time to watch her open the cabinet to the right of the sink and frown.

“Wrong side,” he says, and she glances over her shoulder at him. He shrugs. “Glasses, right? I keep them on the other side.”

“No one keeps their glasses on the left side of the sink.”

“Skye says the same thing.”

“For once, Skye’s right.” He snorts at her, and her mouth curves into a soft smile as she reaches for the glasses. “You’re not going to ask me why I’m here?”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” he replies as she brings down two tumblers. “Shouldn’t you be at home, though? Doing whatever it is you do on the weekend?”

May chuckles. “You got me out of the second half of a little league double-header,” she responds casually. Against his better judgment—and, more likely, his self-preservation—Grant feels his mouth drop open. For a moment, words completely fail him. She glances over and cracks an actual smile. “You are familiar with baseball, aren’t you?”

“I didn’t know you were familiar with _children_ ,” Grant blurts dumbly. She laughs and cracks the seal on the bottle. “So, wait, you have kids? Because I asked Skye about you, and she said—”

“This isn’t about me or about Skye,” she interrupts. She splashes two fingers of tequila into the bottom of the glass and holds it out to him. He lingers in the doorway. “You said you know why I’m here,” she presses, cocking her head to one side, “and Skye said you won’t talk about feelings unless you drink.”

He huffs and finally crosses into the kitchen. “Skye’s not exactly an expert on human emotion,” he reminds her.

“No, but she’s an expert on you,” May returns. She caps up the bottle and then steps past him with it, glass in hand. “Of course, you’re not exactly very hard to read. Fitz’s grandfather dies, you spent an afternoon with him—”

“Three hours,” Grant corrects, following.

“—and then, you stop attending any of Skye’s get-togethers.” She sets the tequila on the coffee table before settling into the corner of the couch. Grant watches her for a moment, then swigs his drink before dropping into a chair. “You have to know what that looks like.”

He shrugs. “I’m studying.”

“You don’t need three weeks to study for that test,” she retorts, and he rolls his eyes as he helps himself to another sip of tequila. “You’re smart. Worse, I think you like legal ethics—”

“I don’t know why that’s a character flaw.”

“—and probably know most of the rules already.” She cups her glass between her hands. “You’re hiding.”

Grant raises an eyebrow. “Did Skye tell you that?”

“No, but you just did.” When he snorts at her, she leans forward, her elbows on her thighs. “Do you like this boy?”

“He’s twenty-five, he’s not a—” 

“Grant,” she says again, and he meets her eyes. They’re dark brown and, somehow, fearless. He imagines looking out from the witness stand to find those eyes staring at him—narrow, sharp, unblinking—and then, trying to lie. He flexes his fingers around the glass. “Are you attracted to Fitz?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think he’s attracted to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to find out?”

A sound like a bark of uninvited laughter jumps out from between his lips. “That’s not—”

“I’m not your boss and I’m not Skye,” May cuts him off again. He swigs the tequila again and then stares at the surface of the liquid, watching the ripples against the sides of the glass. “I’m not going to FaceTime with Simmons or gossip about it around the water cooler. Between you and me.”

Grant shakes his head. “It’s complicated.”

“No, it’s a yes or no question.”

“That doesn’t make it _simple_ ,” he returns. He finishes the last swallow in his glass and sets it down, hard, on the coffee table. His fingers run through his still-damp hair as he stands; once he’s on his feet, he circles the chair and grips the back of it. “My whole life, I had school and I had work,” he tells her. “I went through my undergrad classes, I worked for the county, I started law school, I had internships. That’s it. Me, the job, the _goal_.” He realizes that he’s gesturing, so he curls his fingers into a fist and presses it against the upholstery. “Even when Skye blew into my life, I thought I had this handled. I could deal with one unexpected friend nosing her way into my life. But now, with you and with Simmons and yeah, with Leo, I just—” 

The words escape him, jumbling in the back of his throat and coming out as a sigh, and all he can do is shake his head. When he glances at May, she’s watching him, her lips pursed into a tight line. “I don’t know how to do this,” he finally manages.

She frowns slightly. “How to date someone?” 

“No,” he replies, “how to have _friends_.” Something like surprise flickers across her expression, and he closes his eyes for a few seconds. “I’ve never had a group of people I just spend time with, who seem to—to _value_ me, and I don’t want to screw that up because I happen to find a guy attractive. Guys are a dime a dozen.”

“Guys may be, but Fitz isn’t,” May says quietly, and Grant raises his head to glance over at her. She sips from her glass and then lazily dangles it from her fingers. “Fitz isn’t just any guy, Grant. He’s not someone you pick up in a bar, date, and discard. I think you know that.” He huffs a breath and turns to look out the window. “And when you meet that person who isn’t a dime a dozen—who isn’t even a million dollars a dozen—the question becomes whether they’re worth the risk.”

He watches the trees sway in the hazy summer dusk before he asks, “And are they?”

She releases a breath that sounds like a chuckle. “Almost always.”

They sit in silence for what feels like hours after that, May refilling his glass and Grant returning to his chair to drink it. The oranges and pinks of sunset phase into the purples of twilight, and he can’t help but wonder what the others are doing at the fair. Skye’d texted him the previous afternoon about a country cover band— _an excuse to wear cowboy boots!!!!!_ she’d enthused, and he’d laughed—and he imagines them crowding in front of a rickety wooden stage and listening to an off-key rendition of “Achy Breaky Heart.”

Skye’d once coaxed him into too many beers and taught him every word to that damn song. He’s still grateful her selection for their post-sushi karaoke duet a month earlier was Elton John.

May rises once the sky’s nearly dark, her glass still only half-empty. She leaves it and the bottle on the table; when Grant tries to hand her the latter, she shakes her head. He trails her into the foyer, watching as she picks up her baseball cap.

“Talk to Fitz,” she tells him as she puts her hat back on. “Because the longer you wait to take the risk, the scarier it’ll become.”

He rolls his lips together. “And you know this from experience?”

“More or less.”

“Do I at least get to know who you took your risk on?”

She glances up, her ponytail falling down her back, and their eyes meet again. A smile slowly nudges at the corners of her mouth. “No one,” she finally answers.

“No one? But I thought—”

“He was never the risk,” she says simply. “I was.”

Grant feels his jaw work for a moment, but before he can come up with a response, she opens the door. “Goodnight, Grant,” she says.

He nods. “Goodnight, May,” he replies, and shuts the door behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be announcing some stuff about the next Motion Practice Friday, the trajectory of this story, and my plans for the MPU sabbatical on [my tumblr](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com) this weekend. Stop by and say hi! You know, if you want.


	9. The Things that Go Bump at the Campsite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant spends a muggy July night camping with his friends.
> 
> (He can hear you muttering, Skye.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to my awesome and ever-prompt betas, Jen and saranoh. If only I could take them camping.

“It was a dark and reasonably stormy night,” Leo says exactly one half-second before the flashlight under his chin flickers and dies.

Simmons and Skye erupt into gales of laughter as he swears and starts smacking it against the side of the log, and against his better judgment, Grant smiles. July’s not his favorite time to camp—he hates the humidity and the mere thought of mosquitos leave his skin feeling itchy—but Skye’d practically thrown herself off his couch and onto the floor when he’d refused.

“May _said_ she talked to you,” she’d complained, and he’d rolled his eyes as he kicked her legs off his coffee table while he passed by. She’d flashed him one of her least-flattering scowls before replacing them. “She said she explained the whole risk-and-reward rubric. Which means, by the way, that you should be crawling your way into his pants with renewed vigor.”

Grant’d stopped flicking through his DVR’s list of recorded shows to glance down at her. “Vigor?”

“Yeah. You know, forcible enthusiasm or whatever.” She’d punched the air, leaving him to roll his eyes as he returned to the TV menu. “You know you can’t actually end up with him if you never do anything about it, right? Because if I know one thing, it’s that Fitz _so_ won’t make the first move.”

“Why is everything about making moves?” he’d demanded. She’d snorted at him as he finally selected the right show. “I get the pathological need to look after your friends—” 

“Uh, only you would find my concern about other people’s happiness pathological.”

“—but maybe this—possibility between Leo and me just needs to run its course in its own time.” She’d whipped her head around to stare at him, and he’d raised both hands. “I’m just saying.”

“Yeah, and what you’re saying is wrong,” she’d retorted. She’d flipped her hair back over her shoulder and leaned over him to steal the remote. “And stupid. And because of that, I am buying two itty bitty tents instead of one big toasty-warm one for all of us to share.”

He’d smirked. “You and I share a tent, Fitz-Simmons might talk.”

“The only thing I’m sharing with you is my condom supply when you finally get laid,” she’d shot right back, and then turned up the volume on _Iron Chef America_ so loud that Grant’d thought his eardrums might explode.

He thinks they might explode again now, with Leo pounding the flashlight against the log hard enough that Grant feels the vibration. Sprawled out on a blanket that’s dangerously close to their fire, Skye snorts in laughter and sets Simmons off again. “Fine,” Leo mutters, “I’ll just do it without that bloody thing. No loss.”

Simmons covers her mouth, but it only muffles her giggles. “Fitz, sweetheart, I can’t remember the last time you managed to get through a ghost story even with three torches and a pile of notecards to remind you of the plot.” She glances over at Grant, shaking her head sympathetically. “He’s very bad at telling stories of any kind.”

Leo shoots her a withering look. “I tell plenty of excellent stories, thank you.”

She screws up her face. “Name one.”

“This one, for a start,” he challenges, and Simmons rolls her eyes as she reaches for her beer. Leo mirrors the gesture, picking up his bottle and finding it empty. He bends to grab a fresh one, and Grant spends a few seconds too long admiring the line of his back. He only realizes how intently he’s staring when Skye mutters _get laid_ under her breath.

He glares at her on principle and watches as the flickering firelight illuminates her smug, toothy smile.

“As I was saying,” Leo finally continues, his arms on his thighs as he leans forward, “it was a dark and reasonably stormy night. The wind whistled through the abandoned council house as Sally entered in through the broken front door. You see, Sally liked photography and intended to take pictures of the beautiful old building: its gardens, its stairs, its peeling wallpaper in the pa—” 

“The weeping angels episode?” Simmons suddenly exclaims. The stump she’s sitting on rocks on the uneven ground, and when she rebalances herself, she knocks over her beer. “Fitz, you can’t crib _Doctor Who_ and expect that we won’t—”

“They didn’t know it was _Doctor Who_ until you opened your mouth!” Leo protests. Even in the dim light from the fire, it’s obvious that his entire face has flared bright, unmistakable red. He glances briefly in Grant’s direction, almost like gauging his reaction, before twisting back to glare at Simmons. “And it’s the best episode Moffat ever wrote, what with the atmosphere and the DVDs and—”

“And it can’t be your campfire story!” Simmons chimes in. Grant cast his eyes over at Skye, who shrugs as she sips her beer. “You can’t really believe that Skye and Grant will want to sit through your simplified, Wikipedia version of—”

“Please, Jemma, I’m not going to tell the _Wikipedia_ version, I deserve a little credit for—”

“For stealing the plot of something written by Steven-bloody-Moffat and trying to pass it off as—”

“Uh, actually,” Grant interrupts, and both clerks stop mid-argument to stare at him. He feels Skye’s eyes on him, too, dark and unrelenting even in shadow. In the quiet, muggy July night, he can imagine that they’re the only four people on the planet.

When he glances at Leo, the other man wets his lips. They stand damp and slightly parted, and Grant wastes entire seconds wondering how he kisses.

He clears his throat. “Actually,” he repeats, swinging his own beer bottle between his fingers, “I don’t know anything about that doctor-whatever show. It might be nice to hear about the episode.”

Simmons groans aloud, but Leo’s entire face bursts into a grin. “Really?” they ask at the same time.

“Yeah, Ward, _really_?” Skye chimes in dryly.

He rubs the side of his beer bottle with his middle finger for the next five minutes, to make sure she gets the message.

Leo really is an awful storyteller, and Grant barely follows the story of living statutes that steal blue phone boxes and that torture you by sending you to the past to lead a full and healthy life. Instead, he spends the next fifteen minutes studying the way Leo comes alive in the dancing firelight, his hands fluttering through the empty spaces in front of him like he’s manipulating invisible characters. Grant may not be able to picture Sally Sparrow—“Pretty, like Jemma, but not as mean,” Leo explains at one point, and Skye bursts out laughing—but he can definitely picture weeks and months of Leo dragging him through ridiculous stories he barely understands.

Leo ends Sally’s happily-ever-after with this breathless sigh like it’s the greatest love story ever told, and Grant wonders whether he’s ever felt that way about his own life.

It’s well after midnight by the time the story’s over, the four of them trading yawns across the campfire until Skye boldly declare that it’s time for bed. They put out the fire and clean up the empty beer bottles and bags of chips, Skye supervising from her place sprawled out on her blanket. 

“You can see a lot of stars,” she comments.

Grant nudges at her side with his foot, and she smacks his leg. “We’re in the middle of nowhere,” he reminds her. “No city lights to screw up the view.”

“And where no one can hear us scream,” Simmons adds, her voice rising and falling in unpredictable crescendos. She wiggles her fingers in front of her own face like the least creepy ghoul ever, and Skye at least rolls her eyes as she reaches for a hand up.

They’re practicing their best evil witch laughs over the smoldering remains of the campfire when Grant finally ducks into the tent he and Leo are meant to share. The cheap camp lantern glows harsh white when Grant flicks it on, revealing that Leo’s already curled up in his sleeping bag. His jeans and sneakers are piled atop his backpack in the corner, his cell phone stuck inside his shoe. He shifts around to glance up at Grant as the tent flaps fall shut behind him, though, and for a few seconds, they stare at one another.

“Sorry, I, uh,” Leo stammers awkwardly. In the unforgiving light, his face burns tomato red. “You should change. I mean, assuming you want to change, and I won’t _watch_ you change, Jemma just has a habit of playing tricks and—”

“You’re fine,” Grant assures him, raising a hand. “I went to military school. You’re nothing compared to showering with ten other guys after drills.”

He peels off his shirt and tosses it into the corner before reaching for his duffel bag. It’s mostly-empty now—he’d brought the camp lantern, a bunch of snacks, the toilet paper that Skye commandeered within the first half hour, all the fire-starting supplies—but he finds a sleeveless shirt and pulls it over his head. He sits down on his sleeping bag to toe off his shoes and tries not to spend the entire time wondering whether Leo’s watching his back.

He blames the beer for his total failure.

He pops the button on his jeans just as Leo asks, “Military school?” When he glances over his shoulder, the other man’s pointedly staring at the canvas above his head. 

Grant rolls his lips together for a few seconds before he shrugs. “Home wasn’t always my favorite place in the world, and I made sure everyone knew it.” He slides out of his jeans and kicks them into the corner before he flops down on top of his sleeping bag. It’s too muggy for layers of insulation over his t-shirt and boxers, he rationalizes—and he kind of likes catching the pink in Leo’s cheeks when he glances back over. The tent’s small enough that they’re almost brushing elbows when they both lay flat on their backs. “The worst of it ended by the time I hit high school, but by then—” He shakes his head “Military school helped.”

“‘Helped’ implies that it didn’t fix whatever brought you there in the first place,” Leo murmurs after a few long, silent seconds.

Grant snorts a little. When he shifts his head on his pillow, their eyes meet. “Some things can’t be fixed,” he replies, and flicks off the lantern.

The darkness of the woods rushes in around them, sudden and oppressive. With his vision blanketed by black, Grant swears he can hear a thousand different things: the rustle of Skye and Simmons settling for the night, the sound of an animal running through the underbrush, the shuffling of Leo rolling over in his sleeping bag. He tries to remember moments like this from his childhood, ones where, despite being lost in the darkness, he felt completely secure, but he can’t. He wonders if they even exist.

He waits the ten, fifteen, twenty-five minutes until Leo’s breathing completely levels out to wet his lips again. “For the record,” he says, his own voice hardly above a whisper, “I think I’d like to date you.”

Leo’s only response is a quiet sigh in his sleep.


	10. The Birthday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant' attempts to do something nice for one of his friends.
> 
> (Don't get used to this, Skye.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to my betas, Jen and saranoh. I'm glad they picked me, or I picked them, or whatever.

“Hi!” chirps the little girl who answers Skye’s door, and Grant, Leo, and Simmons all take a collective step back.

The girl cocks her head to the side, her dark curls bouncing, and peers at the three of them. She’s wearing a bedazzled t-shirt with a giraffe on it, black leggings, and a pair of thick cable-knit socks that can only belong to Skye. On Skye’s enormous TV, the intro screen for Dance Dance Revolution loops back around to the beginning, the announcer encouraging them to _bust a move_.

Grant glances at Leo. Leo shrugs. And Simmons—

“Well, aren’t you unexpected but somewhat adorable!” she greets. She ducks down, her hands on her knees, and flashes the girl a winning smile. The girl squints suspiciously. “Do you belong to one of Skye’s friends or maybe her neighbors? Or a second-cousin twice removed who’s currently studying rare pigeons in Australia?”

“Pigeons?” Leo blurts. Simmons twists to shoot him a dirty look, and he raises his hands. “I’m sorry, I’m all for winning over the strange girl in Skye’s apartment, but rare pigeons?”

“I’m not strange,” the girl protests, and they all whip back around to stare at her. She plants her hands on her hips and scowls up at them. Grant guesses she’s probably seven or eight, but she’s slight for her age and well trained in dramatic head-tilts. “My daddy’s on a trip and my mom’s dealing with my bad brothers.”

“I am _very_ familiar with bad brothers,” Simmons says sympathetically. At Grant’s shoulder, Leo rolls his eyes. “Tell me, is Skye home? We just came by to drop off—”

“Oh my god, Beth, do you want your mom to _kill_ me when she finds out you answered my door without— ” The sentence dissolves into a squeak as Skye skids to a stop behind the strange little kid. She glances at each of them in turn. “Uh. Hey, guys.” 

“Surprise!” Simmons announces. She spreads out her hands and wiggles her fingers; Leo helpfully holds up the plastic sack from Skye’s favorite bakery. “Happy birthday!” 

In Grant’s defense—not that he needs one for doing something _nice_ —he hadn’t meant to discover that Skye’s birthday was in the middle of July. She didn’t list it on her Facebook page, and he’d definitely never seen her driver’s license and its legendary “shameful hair.” In fact, he’d remained totally clueless about it until he’d gone down to her office to borrow a charger for his phone and caught a glimpse of a parking form on her desk.

“It said July 12,” he’d reported to Leo at lunch the same day. Not that he and Leo now grabbed lunch together once a week, or anything, just— Look, it’d come up in the lunch line, is his point, and Leo’s head’d jerked up from the selection of questionable pies. Grant’d raised his hands. “I know you and Simmons take stock in those kinds of things, so—”

“I don’t, not really, but Jemma definitely will,” Leo’d replied. “We’ll have to bring her cake. She likes cake, right?”

“I guess?”

“You guess?” Leo’d nearly dumped his tray in his effort to spin around and glare at Grant. “Jemma’s favorite desert is a cinnamon apple crumble from that seedy diner three blocks east of the law school campus topped with a dollop of Cool Whip. _Never_ imitation. Cool Whip.”

Grant’d frowned. “That’s oddly specific.”

“Of course it’s oddly specific, she’s my best friend.” Leo’d heaved a sigh and, shaking his head, headed for the cashier’s station. “You’re appalling.”

“I’m also paying today,” Grant’d reminded him, and if he’d pressed himself to Leo’s back while handing the cashier his debit card, it was completely accidental.

But the lunch conversation’d taken place almost a week earlier, and now, Skye’s staring at them like they’re all enemies of the state. “July 12, right?” Grant asks. He holds up the card that they’d bought and waves it like a flag of surrender. “I know you’ve been keeping it a secret, but—”

“It’s your _birthday_?” the little girl in front of Skye demands. She spins around to stare up at the woman, and for a second, Grant swears that Skye curses under her breath. “You didn’t tell me!” She pauses and narrows her eyes. “Worse, you didn’t tell _Mama_.”

“Trust me when I say your mom _totally_ knows all about my birthday,” Skye retorts sharply. “And that day,” she adds, glaring directly at Grant, “is definitely not today.”

Simmons rolls her eyes. “Oh, please. We know you like your secrets, what with your apartment-hopping and your thirteen different passwords on all your electronics, but you can let it go on your _birthday_.” Skye opens her mouth to reply, but it’s evidently too late to protest: Simmons grabs Leo by his shirt and drags him bodily into the apartment. Leo flails for a second, then finds Grant’s wrist and pulls him along too.

Grant’s not sure _watching him squirm under Leo’s gentle fingers_ was on Skye’s birthday list, but at least she grins about it.

She also closes and locks the door behind them, and it’s not until Grant twists around to see Beth standing behind him that he remembers she’s there at all. She peers up at him. “Are you Skye’s boyfriend?” she asks.

Simmons stops searching through the kitchen for plates to choke on air, and Leo almost knocks the flat of cupcakes off the counter. Grant gracefully sputters before he blurts, “No, no, I am definitely _not_ Skye’s boyfriend.”

“Yeah, Ward’s more into the manly type,” Skye says as she passes by. 

Grant considers protesting, but Beth nods like she understands. She walks over to the end of the counter and, through a series of rather impressive hops and wriggles, hoists herself up onto the granite. “My mom and dad have a friend who likes other boys,” she reports, her eyes still on Grant.

“Lots of guys like other guys,” Grant replies—not necessarily because he wants to, but because the girl’s stare is hard to escape.

Simmons smirks. “Like Leo.”

Leo stops opening the tray of cupcakes to shoot her a withering glance. “And that’s without mentioning women who are attracted to other women, isn’t it, Jemma?”

“Wow, okay, she’s here for me to watch her, not for my friends to teach a master class in human sexuality.” Skye digs into the fridge and tosses the kid a juice box. She catches it easily and starts fighting with the straw. “And for the record? You guys seriously did not need to do this.”

“It’s your _birthday_ ,” Simmons reminds her. “We can’t very well ignore your _birthday_.”

She pulls the pink-striped candles out of her back pocket and starts sticking them into the various cupcakes. Grant’s ashamed to admit that he’s not totally sure of Skye’s age—somewhere in her lesser twenties, he _thinks_ , but he’s never asked. They’d argued about it in the party store for twenty minutes before agreeing to get and use a whole twelve-pack of candles, no questions asked. Either way, he leans against the side of the counter and watches the way Skye stares at Simmons while arranges the candles.

“You really didn’t have to do this,” she says again, but softer.

Grant knocks an elbow into her arm. “You sure about that?” he retorts, and she elbows him back. 

Simmons finishes up with the candles and lights them with a book of matches that materialize from inside her bottomless purse. Skye sweeps her hair over her shoulder, ready to lean down and blow them out, but Beth shouts, “No!” 

They all freeze. “No?” Skye asks.

The girl crosses her arms over her chest. “You can’t blow out your candles unless everybody sings with all the right words.”

Leo flashes her the kind of smile that steals Grant’s breath. “As opposed to the wrong words?” 

“Where nobody looks like a monkey or smells like poo,” Beth explains, and Grant only figures out that those particular lyrics are an exclusively American tradition after he and Skye stop laughing hysterically.

After the singing is finished, the candles are all out—“Did you wish for a boyfriend like your friend who likes boys?” Beth asks, and Skye literally shoves a cupcake into the kid’s hands—and the cupcakes are mostly devoured, Simmons drags Leo over to play Dance Dance Revolution. They shuck their shoes and start slipping around on the dance mats, laughing, and Grant tries very hard not to study the way Leo laughs as he bounces around. He accepts the beer that Skye brings over to the poker table (which, with its cover on, serves as an _actual_ table) and watches as she flops into the seat next to him.

“We texted May, by the way,” he notes as he sucks the last of the icing off his finger, “but she said she had other plans.”

Skye shrugs. “Doesn’t she always say that?” 

“Well, I figured since we were coming here for your birthday, maybe—”

“My brothers Skyped mean things to a girl,” Beth says randomly, and Grant glances over at her. She’s still perched on the counter, swinging her legs idly as she eats the sixth, unclaimed cupcake. There’s pink frosting smeared on the corner of her mouth. “It wasn’t nice, and they had to go say sorry.”

“As well they should,” Simmons says as she bounces over. She’s slightly short of breath as she dives into the fridge for a bottle of water. “Do you want to play with me and Leo? He’s rubbish. You could probably beat him.”

“Oi, I heard that!” Leo yells from the dance mat.

Beth grins. “Okay,” she chirps, and Simmons helps her slide off the counter before leading her over to what’s now become Skye’s private dance center.

Grant waits until the kid picks a fast, extra-bouncy song to slide the envelope from earlier across the table. Skye misses it at first—she’s watching Simmons and Beth add creative booty-shaking moves to their rhythmic stomping—and when she finally sees it, her face falls. “Ward—”

“Stop telling me that we shouldn’t’ve done it and just open it,” he encourages. She rolls her eyes but tears open the seal anyway. The card itself is stupid—it features skunks and claims to be “from every stinkin’ one of us”—but at his suggestion, they’ve all written little notes for her inside. Simmons’s is funny, Leo’s is sweet (and thanks her for “knowing when to push,” whatever that means), and Grant’s—

“I know you like your secrets,” he says as she reads over his note, a simple scribble that says _Like you’re always reminding me, friends are mostly family you pick_ , “and I know that I probably shouldn’t’ve told Leo about it after I saw your birthday on some forms on your desk.”

“The parking renewal form?” Skye asks, looking up.

He nods, and her brow bunches. “It was there that day I came down to borrow your charger, and I— Hey, _ow_!” She pulls back her arm to hit him again, and he scoots his chair away. “The hell is wrong with you?”

“No swearing!” Beth calls from the next room, and Leo bursts out laughing.

Grant glares at both of them before twisting back toward Skye. “I get it, I shouldn’t have looked at your forms, but you weren’t there and—”

“You shouldn’t have looked at it because that’s _not_ my birthday,” she retorts. Grant’s mouth falls shut; next to him, Skye sighs. “The form was on my desk because it was _wrong_. The parking lady sent it back for me to correct it.”

He frowns. “You got your own birthday wrong?”

“No, you idiot, I— Look, where I grew up, there were a lot of nuns.” He knows he keeps gaping at her blankly, because she huffs a breath at him. “They were old-school. A bunch of them even came over from Ireland when they were young, and they’re the ones who taught me how to write everything, _including_ the date.”

“What does that have to do with—”

She rolls her eyes. “Hey, Fitzsimmons!” she calls out, her eyes never leaving Grant’s face and what he continues to assume is his very lost stare. Behind her, both of the clerks stop dancing. “When you write the date, what comes first: the date, or the month?”

They glance at one another for a moment, then back at Skye. “The date!” they answer in unison.

Skye tilts her head at him for a moment, her lips pursed expectantly, and Grant— When it all clicks together, Grant rolls his head back far enough that it almost hits the wall behind him. “Your birthday’s not July 12,” he groans, “it’s December 7.”

“Good work there, Sherlock,” she says, and claps him on the shoulder. He brushes her hand away to reach for his beer, but he realizes after a second that she’s still looking at him. There’s something soft in her expression. He raises an eyebrow, and she shakes his head. “I would’ve told you if you asked,” she informs him quietly. “I’m not _that_ into my secrets.”

“Except for the one where you’ve acquired a mixed-race eight-year-old,” he retorts, and she punches him in the shoulder for his trouble.

They stay for another hour or so, he and Skye moving to the couch and heckling the dancers until Leo abandons ship and flops down at Grant’s side. Their arms and knees bump, and Grant suspects from Leo’s pleased little grin that the contact’s entirely on purpose. After another few minutes, Beth and Simmons join them, with the former crawling under Skye’s arm and the latter perching on the arm of the couch.

“Can your friends come to my next birthday party?” Beth asks once she’s lolled her head against Skye’s shoulder.

“That is _so_ a question for your mom,” she replies, and Beth giggles

Beth hugs Simmons and Leo goodbye when they crowd out the door but hardly glances at Grant, not that he deserves anything better. Instead, the person who grips him in a hug is Skye. It’s so fierce and unexpected that he hardly knows what to do with his hands; by the time he rests them on her back, she’s already stepping away. “You’re a punk,” she informs him with a grin, “but I’m pretty glad I picked you.”

“You’re not too bad yourself,” he replies, and he knocks his fist into _her_ shoulder before he finally follows Leo and Simmons down the stairs and out into the lobby of the building. 

It’s raining when they get there, the kind of surprise summer shower that promises to drown you, and Simmons offers to run out and bring the car around so they don’t all “end up like properly-drowned rats.” He and Leo lean against the wall just inside the lobby, waiting.

“You know today’s probably not Skye’s real birthday, don’t you?” Leo asks, and Grant blinks before glancing over at him. The other man shrugs, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Beth said her mum works in our building—I’m guessing in IT, with Skye—and that they’ve been friends for a long time. Skye’s secretive, but I figure that if anybody would’ve known about Skye’s birthday, it’d be the one friend who trusts her not to lose or break her kid.”

Grant snorts a little laugh before he admits, “I know.” Leo quirks an eyebrow, and he sighs. “Skye told me while you guys were playing with Beth that I got the date wrong. I just—” He shakes his head. “She spends eighty percent of her energy trying to make the people around her happy, and the other twenty percent complaining that I have no clue how to do that. And now, the one time I try—” 

“I think you did okay,” Leo interrupts. Grant glances over at him, frowning, and he shrugs again. “So what if you got the date wrong? You wanted to do something nice for Skye and you did—the same way you did when you brought me soup after Granddad died.”

Grant allows himself the shadow of a smile. “You know that was kind of Skye’s idea, right?”

Leo rolls his eyes. “I’m not an _idiot_ ,” he chides, and Grant finally surrenders to a chuckle. Next to him, Leo smiles in a way that manages not only to warm his whole face, but also Grant’s stomach. “But do you know what else I know?”

“If I say yes, will you tell me anyway?”

“I know that the soup itself was your idea. And,” he says after a pause, “I know how incredibly sweet it was.”

Grant opens his mouth to protest about how, in the grand scheme of things, _soup_ is hardly that grand a gesture, but the blare of Simmons’s car horn cuts him off. He pushes away from the wall a second after Leo, prepared to follow him out—

And then freezes when, out of the blue, Leo reaches up and kisses him on the corner of the mouth. It’s brief and soft, more a tiny puff of breath than actual brush of his lips, but Grant almost trips over his own two feet anyway. Leo lingers next to him, his hand hovering over Grant’s arm, and Grant’s caught up in a moment by how easy it’d be to pin Leo to the nearest wall and kiss him until they both forget how to breathe.

He _wants_ to.

He really, desperately wants to. 

Instead, though, he swallows the urge and glances down at Leo. “Sweet, huh?” he asks, his voice more a rasp than a whisper. 

“Very,” Leo replies, and blushes pink to his hairline before heads for the car.


	11. The Day at the End of the Month

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant takes a short break from his feelings to embark on a yearly ritual with a friend.
> 
> (Yes, okay, he maybe cares a lot about you, Skye.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The following is an utter bastardization of Skye's canon backstory.
> 
> Eternal thanks to my fantastic beta-ladies, Jen and saranoh. I'd totally stand in the rain for both of them.

“You don’t need to do this on the same exact day every year,” Grant Ward points out, the collar of his windbreaker turned up against the rain.

Skye shoots him a truly murderous glance. “Shut up, Ward,” she retorts, and then, she snaps her umbrella open.

It’s funny, Grant thinks sometimes, how a woman like Skye spent her entire life drifting around the country and still ended up right back where she started. He’s listened again and again to boozy stories of her grand adventures _elsewhere_. The facts always shift slightly between tellings, morphing into impossible, twisted fairy tales, but he knows the general premise of most of them.

Like Skye’s uncle in Malta, who used to invite her to lavish parties before he disappearing onto a private island, his fingers sticky from his work on the wrong end of the law.

Or the time that she got sick of living in a conversion van and convinced a twenty-something single father to let her crash on his couch for three weeks.

Or how she landed in solitary lockdown during her one stint in juvenile detention because she used the computers meant for their in-house day school to order fifty-seven pan pizzas on the county’s dime.

Or the tale of the rich hedge fund manager with personalized license plates on his Ferrari who offered her a computer science job at fifteen and then requested she provide other _services_.

Grant believes exactly none of the stories, but he believes the glint in Skye’s eye when she tells them, the crooked curve of her mouth when she ricochets off the one ounce of truth and bounces back into her cocoon of lies. He knows she spent most her childhood in foster care, that she served at least six months in juvenile detention after running away from a group home, and that yes, after she aged out of the system, she travelled the country. In her bedroom, hidden in shoeboxes and in private nooks and crannies, there’s proof of her travels: photographs from the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building, seashells from each ocean, postcards from almost every state. The woman who existed before Skye Carson applied for a job in the judicial complex exists in those scattered remains, pieces of a person Grant will never really meet.

But they also exist here, in the wind and rain of a blustery late-July day.

He watches Skye’s bright pink umbrella bob through the downpour before, finally, he slides out of the car.

The glory of the Midwest—at least, according to one of Grant’s college history professors—is its rich history of pioneers, people blazing trails through adversity and landing mostly on their feet. That past, his professor’d always insisted, remained etched on the region even after covered wagons gave way to convertibles, rooting itself in architecture, in food, in styles of music. Standing in the rain, Grant reads the history of their county like pages from his textbook: the old white-washed wooden church, the sloping roads leading lazily out of town, the empty wheat fields beyond the aging fences. The gravestones that stretch out along the side of the church, gray stone fingers in the grayer rain, tell the same story. The first few no longer offer names or dates, just memories in the form of shapeless hollows.

Grant rests his hand on one, the stone rough but warm under his fingers. Skye weaves between the careful rows on the cemetery path, her pink umbrella the only sign of color. Nobody plants flowers in the older section of the graveyard. As far as Grant can tell, nobody remembers the people buried there.

He follows Skye through the rain.

Honestly, he’d completely forgotten the date until only three days earlier. He’d ridden the heady, half-drunken high of Leo’s kiss for almost a week before he’d realized that relationships required more than stolen kisses in apartment foyers. The thought alone had thrown him into a panicky tailspin, and he’d stopped talking in the middle of a sentence to stare at absolutely nothing. Of course, the sentence in question had been part of a canned recommendation for a defendant’s sentencing, and Maria Hill’d stepped on his toe under counsel table as punishment.

Later, Darcy Lewis’d sent him eight different YouTube videos featuring a stuttering and helpless Porky Pig, and Grant’d finally installed an emoticon pack on his phone just to text her a flaming piece of poop and, after it, a middle finger.

Needless to say, he’d avoided Leo as he tried to figure out his next move. And avoiding Leo meant avoiding both Simmons and Skye, until—

“You’re the worst at everything,” Skye’d lamented, banging her head against the picnic table. They’d bought crappy sandwiches in the cafeteria and planned to eat there until Simmons spotted them and waved; then, Grant’d grabbed Skye by the wrist and dragged her out of the building and over to the park across the street. They’d evicted some dark-haired girl with a Tamora Pierce novel from a picnic table, and Skye’d immediately started to complain.

Grant’d sent her a warning look. “You have no idea why I didn’t want to eat with Simmons.”

“Uh, yeah, I do,” Skye’d returned, her chin resting on her folded arms. “You avoided Jemma because seeing Jemma means maybe admitting your continued and unsuccessful crush on Fitz. And admitting your continued and unsuccessful crush on Fitz leads to, I don’t know, man-pain and feelings.” She’d waved a single finger at him, and he’d rolled his eyes. “And plotting. Because Jem and I, we’d totally plot.”

He’d stopped unwrapping his sandwich. “Jem,” he repeated.

“Yeah. Jem. Short for Jemma.” She’d scowled at him. “Please tell me you didn’t think her first name was Simmons.”

“I just find it interesting that you’re on a more-than-first-name basis with her.” She’d huffed at him, tossing her hair like a teenager, and started in on her own sandwich. They’d cracked open their sodas and picked slimy tomato off wilted lettuce in relative silence before he’d thought to add, “We can go out this weekend.”

“Depends on who ‘we’ are.”

“All of us. You, me, Leo, _Jem_.” He’d leaned on the last name, and she’d rolled her eyes at him. “Think about it. With most the college kids gone for a summer, that coffee place with the pretentious name you like might not be so packed. We can go to their hemp-scented open mic night. If you behave, I might even buy you a drink.”

He’d grinned at her, but she’d hardly cracked a smile. “Okay, one, the Jacobean Fox is not a pretentious name,” she’d defended, but she’d kept her face tipped away from his. “And two, as much as I’d love to jump on your invitation to a totally lame double-date—”

He’d snorted. “It’s hardly a date, thanks.”

“—we can’t on Saturday because it’s A-day.” Grant’s grin had dropped off his face, and Skye’d balled up her napkin before tossing it back on the table. When she’d raised her eyes, they—along with her shoulders and jaw—were tense. Bracing for impact, Grant’d thought to himself. “Not that you need to come,” she’d added, “because now that you have, like, point-five percent of a boyfriend—”

“Hey,” he’d interrupted gently, and she’d snapped her mouth shut. She’d glanced away then, and he’d suddenly remembered that for all her bluster and ridiculousness, she wasn’t even twenty-two yet. “I forgot, that’s all. I wouldn’t miss A-day. You know that.”

She’d released a shaky little breath. “Even for Leo?”

He’d nodded. “Even for him.”

Of course, tramping through puddles while rainwater slides down the side of his neck, Grant now wishes he’d promised something a little drier.

The grave markers that curl around the side of the church and then behind it become progressively newer, the worn gray stones replaced with shiny, treated ones in a variety of colors. Crosses, angels, and plinths fade away into flat-faced rectangles that stand on end or are set into the ground. The names slowly morph into variations on a theme, and for a moment, Grant pictures it like a giant family tree, its branches all spreading out from the church. 

Skye finally stops walking.

The grave at her feet is nestled near the very back of the church yard and features a speckled brown granite stone with deeply-etched letters. She bends in front of it, settling the small clump of flowers in the sconce that’s half-buried in the mud; she straightens them, then clears dirt and dead grass away. When she sits back on her haunches, Grant can read the same name he’s stared at, unquestioningly, for three years—and that, if his math is right, Skye’s known about since her childhood.

He wets his lips. “Who is she?” he asks quietly.

Skye jerks as if awoken from a trance, nearly toppling over into the wet grass. Grant catches her shoulder and steadies her; when she rises up from her crouch, she shakes him off and steps away. He holds up his hands. “I’ve come along with you and I’ve never asked,” he defends, and she twists her face away from him. “I’ve let you keep your secrets. Hell, I’ve kept my own.”

She snorts and tosses her head. “Your massive levels of gay were never a secret, Ward.”

“My sexuality barely makes the top ten list, and you know it.” He thinks, for a moment, he catches the corner of her mouth curling into a smile. “I know your birthday, now,” he presses, and she tightens her grip on her umbrella. “It’s about time I know who Laura Avery is, too.”

Skye rolls her lips together and glances back down at the gravestone. Despite the umbrella, her face is damp. “She was my first case manager,” she says quietly, and Grant feels something in the depths of his stomach twist and knot. “I didn’t exactly grow up with parents or anything like that, and— Anyway, she came every week, you know? Made sure the nuns or the orphanage people or _whoever_ were feeding me, keeping me in diapers and toys, the whole nine yards. She was nice in a time when not a lot of people were.” She drags her fingers through her hair, then shakes her head. “Right after I turned seven, I— Fitz-Simmons would call it ‘disrupting,’ I guess, but the long story short is that I needed out of my foster home. Laura came in the middle of the night, picked me up to take me to a shelter and get me _out_ of that hell hole, and—”

Her voice catches, and for a second, Grant watches her shoulders shudder. He steps forward, water seeping into his sneakers, but Skye shakes her head again. “Black ice on the interstate,” she says finally, a whisper hardly audible over the sound of the rain. “We spun out, she couldn’t—” She huffs another shaky breath. “She shouldn’t have even been out, but she was because of me.”

The whole-body shudder that runs through her is accompanied by a helpless, cut-off sound, and Grant hardly thinks twice before he reaches for her. He pulls her under his arm, a damp half-hug that he knows is woefully inadequate; she presses her face to his shoulder for a moment before she drops the umbrella to wrap her arms all the way around him. They stand in the rain, Skye held tightly against them and Laura Avery’s grave at their feet, for much longer than necessary.

After a couple seconds, though, Grant feels himself frowning. He pulls away carefully, untangling his fingers from where they slotted through Skye’s hair. She wipes her face with the heel of her hand before meeting his eyes. “Black ice in July?” he asks.

She rolls her eyes. “No, you idiot, black ice in February. I come in July because she always used to take me on one special day trip at the end of the month.” She glances back at the gravestone. “I figure I owe her at least one special trip of my own.”

Grant nods at her, and she spares him one half-second smile before she finally bends down and picks up her umbrella. When he hesitates at the gravestone to allow her the usual space, she snorts and links her arm in his. They’re both soaking wet, their clothes sticking to them like a second layer of skin, but Grant still feels himself smiling.

They’re almost all the way to the car, Laura Avery’s grave no longer in sight, when Skye glances up at him. “So, when _exactly_ were you planning to tell me that Fitz kissed you in the foyer of my building? Inquiring minds want to know.”

He feels his mouth drop open, but try as he might, no sound escapes. She grins as she reaches into his jacket pocket and snags his car keys. It’s only after she dances away, umbrella spinning, that he finally sputters, “There is no way you can know that happened.” She cackles, and he jabs a finger in her direction. “Nobody was there to see it, Skye. Nobody except me and—” He pauses. “No.”

Skye, beaming, leans her arms on the top of the car. “Go ahead, Bella. Say it out loud.”

“There’s no way he told you.” When her smile grows, he throws up his hands. “Skye, there is absolutely no way that Leo admitted he kissed me. There’s just— There’s _no_ way.”

“Honey, you have so much to learn about the hearts of boys,” Skye retorts, and she twirls her umbrella like a cartoon villain before she climbs into the car.


	12. The Taco Cart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant and Leo run into a familiar face at lunch.
> 
> (Maybe next time you shouldn't ditch them, Skye.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to my intrepid betas, Jen and saranoh. Maybe I should buy them tacos.

“Okay, if you’re on a date with another human being, I just lost fifty dollars in an office pool,” Darcy Lewis says, and Grant Ward sighs.

Of the few dozen food carts that drift around the city during the summer months, only three actually qualify as edible: the hot dog and sausage cart, the barbeque cart, and this: the taco cart. It’s parked in the actual _park_ today, and the spicy tang of the owner’s eight different flavors of homemade salsa rushes around on the summer wind.

Grant’d like to also rush around on the summer wind. Preferably far, far away from this particular part of the state.

Darcy, meanwhile, just grins at him. “Silence isn’t an answer, you know. Except maybe if I’m counting your silence as meaning _yes, I’m out with my super cute boyfriend, didn’t you know I had one_?”

Grant rolls his eyes, but he feels warmth—not from the tacos—crawl across his face. It’s the middle of the day on Saturday, sweltering hot and early-August humid, but it’s also the first day of the town’s legendary sidewalk sale. Grant’s not sure he buys the “legendary” part, but Skye’d insisted that he’d find “all the uncomfortable shoes he needed for the rest of his boring life” if he came out shopping with her, Simmons, and Leo. 

She’d spent ten minutes giggling with Simmons before disappearing into a women’s clothing boutique. Grant suspects they slipped out the back as part of a ploy to leave him with—

“Did you do the salsa verde or the one with the weird orange bits?” Leo shouts from the cart. He’s staring at Grant, his plastic tray loaded down with at least six different tacos and a literal stack of churros. He jerks his head toward the salsas. “They both look like they’d taste disgusting, but I refuse to try whatever you picked until I watch your face when you take that first—”

“The one with the orange peppers,” Grant interrupts. Darcy snickers while Leo, oblivious, twists back toward the salsa display. Grant jabs a finger at her. “This is not what you think it is.”

“No? Because I’m pretty sure I just found out that your boyfriend is one of the juvenile clerks.” She crosses her arms, her breasts nearly popping out of her complicated, strappy tank top. “He’s pretty cute.”

“Look, Darcy, he’s not—” 

“Okay, since I’m sure Jemma and Skye’ll get our text messages _eventually_ and come complaining about how hungry they are, I got them each a chicken taco with pico and some of that corn salsa, and I figure they can share our chips.” Leo half-sets, half-drops the tray—complete with tacos, churros, a huge bag of homemade tortilla chips, a bowl of guacamole, and his soda—on a nearby picnic table before he walks over. “I avoided the questionable-looking orange pepper death salsa, but I might go back if you try it and don’t explode from—”

“Okay, this is _adorable_ ,” Darcy interrupts, grin still splitting her face. Leo’s mouth immediately snaps shut, and he glances over at Grant. “I seriously love this. The cardboard intern with no personality—”

“Darcy,” Grant grits out.

“—with a cute boyfriend. It humanizes you a little.” He rolls his eyes, but Darcy ignores him and sticks out a hand. “I don’t think we’ve met,” she says to Leo, “but I work with Grant in the district attorney’s office. I’m Darcy.”

“Leo,” Leo replies uncertainly. He shakes Darcy’s hand limply, his attention still focused on Grant. For a half-second, they stare at each other, Leo’s big, confused eyes searching Grant’s still-red face. When Grant looks away, he swears there’s stones in his stomach _and_ his throat.

They’ve never talked about the kiss, he realizes, and now he’s standing like an idiot in the park, his emotions all over his face and—

“I’ll have to give Grant hell later for leaving his coworkers in the dark about me,” Leo says suddenly, and Grant jerks out of his own head in the second Leo grabs his hand. He threads their fingers together with a careless ease, and Grant swears his heart stops. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about him, but he likes to play at being tougher than he is, my Mister Save-the-Day Super-Lawyer.”

“Uh,” Grant says eloquently.

Darcy, however, bursts out laughing. “He keeps up that act even _out_ of the office? I secretly hoped he maybe lightened up a little when he was with his friends. Well, assuming he had any.”

“Oh, no, he’s still him,” Leo promises. Grant snorts at the absolute sincerity in his voice and is rewarded by a bony elbow in the side. “It’s all stories about how he bravely managed a twelve-person docket call—”

“For the last time, Hill didn’t prep me for that,” Grant retorts.

“—or found the critical typo in one of Rogers’s charging documents— I think he just likes knowing that there’s about a one-percent chance I might fall for some of it and swoon.” He leans into the word _swoon_ hard enough that Grant rolls his eyes. Darcy just keeps laughing. “I mean, lucky for me, he’s very cute and always wearing tight t-shirts, but really. Would it hurt to just talk about baseball statistics and an _NCIS_ rerun? At least that won’t put me to sleep!”

Grant sighs. “Because hearing your color commentary on every new child welfare bill that comes before the legislature is so riveting.”

Leo twists, staring at him but still gripping his hand. There’s betrayal in his tone when he scoffs, “Need I remind you that you said my thoughts on the new requirements for adequate notice were interesting?”

“You went on about it for an hour.”

“It was only forty-two minutes, and you definitely didn’t mind it when, later that night, we spent forty-two minutes—”

“Okay, _that_ one gets filed under ‘things I don’t need to know about my coworkers,’” Darcy suddenly blurts out, holding up her hands. All at once, Grant realizes that she’s there in front of them—and that, during the argument, he’s turned to stand almost chest-to-chest with Leo. A pink flush climbs onto Leo’s cheekbones while Darcy keeps talking. “Anyway, I’m supposed to be helping Peter pick storefronts to photograph for the _Bugle_ , I just wanted to grab a taco for the road.” She jerks her head toward a lanky, brown-haired guy standing on the street corner, snapping pictures of the crowd of people in the park, then smiles. “I’ll see you Monday, Ward. Good to meet you, Leo.”

“The same to you,” Leo says brightly, and tugs Grant over to the picnic table. They end up sitting on the same bench, their legs pressed together and their shoulders bumping as Leo finally explains his whole taco-and-salsa selection rubric.

Grant’s halfway into his first taco (of two) when Leo glances over his shoulder, nods to himself, and slides about a foot and a half down the bench. “Sorry,” he mumbles quickly.

Grant feels his whole body tense. “For?”

“For pretending we were—you know.” Leo waves a hand at the space between them. “I know I should’ve asked your permission, or at least warned you, but, well, I used to be the one all the well-adjusted people in my law school class teased, so I couldn’t very well just stand there while she called you cardboard and—”

“It’s okay,” Grant interrupts. He drops his eyes to his tray for a couple awkward seconds, then sighs. “And you’re right, a little, about me,” he admits. “I put on a different face at work than I do with you, or Simmons, or Skye. I’ve just never seen the value in—”

“Being yourself?” Leo offers. Grant jerks his head up, frowning, and Leo flushes pink as he shakes his head. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t put on your best lawyer face at work, because we _all_ put on our lawyer faces at work. Part of being a lawyer is having a couple different personalities. It’s pretty much a class at the law school, these days.” Grant snorts, and the corner of Leo’s mouth kicks up in a smile. “But the way you are with me, and with Skye and Jemma—even with May, really—it’s different. You creep on secret birthdays and sing karaoke and camp on what I think might’ve been _the_ most humid day in the history of Suffolk County because you want us to be happy.” He shrugs. “You shouldn’t assume that no lawyer in the universe will like _that_ Grant Ward.”

Grant tries to smile, but he knows from the way Leo’s face softens that he’s failed. “I’m not sure enough lawyers know that Grant Ward enough to like him,” he replies.

“I don’t know,” Leo says, turning back to his tray. “I’m a lawyer, and I’m rather fond of the Grant Ward sitting next to me.”

Grant twists to face Leo again, his heart hammering and brain reeling. “Leo, listen, I—”

But then, Skye’s holler of hello echoes across the park, and all he can do is meet Leo’s shy glance and smile softly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am spending the weekend with saranoh, who is not only an MPU beta but also [my coauthor on 180 Days and Counting](http://archiveofourown.org/works/649368/chapters/1181191) and [quite the author in her own right](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SaraNoH/pseuds/SaraNoH). Together, we're planning a video Q&A for our readers. Feel free to [throw questions our way](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/81578034958/kate-sara-q-a). We'll be keeping questions open for a couple days, at least.


	13. The High Bar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant sits down with his friends and discusses the topic of one Leo Fitz.
> 
> (He'll get there eventually, Skye. Maybe.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song mentioned in this chapter is [Kacey Musgrave's "Follow Your Arrow."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ8xqyoZXCc&feature=kp)
> 
> And thank you to my betas, Jen and saranoh, who almost didn't get a mention because _I am horrible_.

“Okay, wait, this is actually kind of huge,” Skye says, and Grant Ward sighs into his beer.

They are, for reasons he can’t completely comprehend, spending their Saturday night at the High Bar, a college dive bar so dingy that he swears the beer is watered down. Squealing college girls sing along to the jukebox, which apparently only plays poppy, warbling country songs. 

“Follow Your Arrow” starts up for the eighth time in the last half-hour, and May’s fingers clutch her glass hard enough that her knuckles go white. “I am going to kill them,” she says.

Skye scowls at her. “No murder on girls’ night,” she says.

“But—”

“None,” Skye repeats, and she refills May’s glass while Simmons pats her arm consolingly.

Grant’d almost skipped out on the whole High Bar experience thanks to the looming pile of readings for his first week of classes, but the longer he’d sat alone in his apartment, the more his mind’d started to wander. He’d spent most of the last week—and the week before that, if he’s honest—thinking about the stupid incident at the taco cart, and the weight of Leo’s hand in his own as they’d stood talking to Darcy. He’d woken up twice in the dead of night from dreams about holding Leo’s hand—and about all the _other_ things Leo’s hands might be good at.

Even thinking about it now causes a hot flush to climb across his cheeks. He swigs his beer, Skye quirking an eyebrow at him as she loads a chip full of queso dip.

“Ordinarily, I might suggest that _maybe_ Fitz didn’t mean the incident the way you perhaps _took_ it,” Simmons says. She’s drinking a gin and tonic instead of cheap beer from a cheaper pitcher, and she stirs the toothpick in it idly. “It’s so easy to take someone’s advances the wrong way, to misunderstand, and then to lie in bed and think maybe that what the other person said about your top wasn’t just a compliment but rather the first time in a _very_ complicated fantasy in which that top lands on the rug by the couches and—” May clears her throat, and Simmons’s face flares bright red. She drops her eyes to her glass. “My point,” she says, “is that while I might usually suggest not to take what happened between you and Fitz at the park the way you’ve taken it, I am not suggesting it in this case because Fitz desperately wants to date you.”

Grant rolls his eyes. “So you all keep saying.”

“Because it’s _true_ ,” Skye retorts, setting her glass down hard. “I’m sorry, but ‘fake boyfriends,’ even for five minutes, is like the number one UST trope on the planet.” He frowns at her, and she sighs. “Unresolved sexual tension. I swear, I have to define that for you every five minutes, it’s like you don’t retain anything I—”

“Have you asked him about it?” May interrupts. 

Skye huffs into her beer as Grant shakes his head. “No.”

May tips her head slightly to the left. “Why not?”

“Besides the fact that nobody on the planet knows how to start that conversation?” he retorts, and she purses her lips. He rubs the side of his neck. “I get that there’s maybe something there—”

“More than maybe,” Simmons sing-songs.

“—but I don’t know how to turn that into— Anything else.” He gestures helplessly and ends up curling his fingers around his glass. “Every relationship I’ve ever been in is one I’ve fallen into. One day we’re chatting, the next day we’re kissing, no actual conversation about it. I’m not exactly trained for this.”

“Uh, except for the part where that’s _exactly_ what you’re doing.” Skye wipes her cheesy fingers on her napkin and leans back in the booth. “Step one: you flirted at the coffee shop the first time you met.”

He snorts. “Your definition of flirting leaves something to be desired.”

“Only because you’re a robot and incapable of human emotion until somebody flicks the right switch,” she retorts, and Simmons grins behind her glass. “Step two: you became friends with the socially awkward clerk who wants to get into your pants. Step three: you went on a date with the socially awkward clerk who wants to get into your pants.”

“They went on a date?” May asks, blinking.

“Technically, they went to the cinema expecting to find us and discovered they’d be alone,” Simmons explains with a shrug. “But they still saw the movie.”

“It was terrible,” Grant reports.

“Chris Pine’s jawline _so_ disagrees with you,” Skye replies, and jabs him with a chip before popping it in her mouth. “Step four,” she continues, mouth full, “you kissed in my foyer and tried not to tell anybody that it happened.”

“No, step four involves him running from his feelings like a terrified three-year-old.” He frowns at May, but she just raises her hands. “I’m sorry, but Tony Stark deals with his feelings more directly than you do.”

Simmons sighs a little dramatically at the reference to Stark’s love life. Grant narrows his eyes at May. “Do you even know Stark?”

“I know more people than you can imagine,” she says casually, and sips her beer.

“Fine, step five’s the kiss he didn’t want to tell us about, but it happened either way.” Skye twists to glance at him. “We just hit step six: the fake boyfriend trope. I think the next step needs to be peeling him out of his skinny jeans.”

“He will probably need peeling,” Simmons agrees with a little nod.

Grant groans at both of them and rolls his head back against the top of the booth. He’s pretty sure there’s dried queso on the ceiling. He closes his eyes. “We can’t just let this all go, can we?”

“No,” the three women answer in unison, and he sighs.

The song finally changes to some crooning country ballad he’s not familiar with, and he studies the back of his eyelids as the college girls all hum along. His friends—if he can call them that—stay quiet except for when they’re crunching down on chips. “Darcy asks about him,” he says finally.

“Meaning?” May asks.

He opens his eyes and glances over. “Every morning when I show up at work, she asks how Leo’s doing. It’s never a big thing, it’s just her being polite, but—” He massages his forehead for a couple seconds. “I’ve worked in that office since May, and she’s just now treating me like a human being. Because she thinks I’m dating Leo.”

Next to him, Skye purses her lips into a tight, serious line. “I’m sure Darcy doesn’t mean it like _that_ , and she’s under a lot of stress with all the shit that’s happened with Barton, so—”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Grant interrupts, holding up a hand. She frowns at him, and he shakes his head. “Before I met you—any of you, really—I didn’t have a lot of friends. Even in undergrad and when I worked for the county, everybody just sort of thought of me like this prickly machine. A mechanical porcupine or something.”

“I thought you said Darcy called him a cardboard—” Simmons starts to say, but Skye cuts her off with a glare.

Grant actually cracks a smile at that. “My point is, I think you all, and Leo, make me better, or something.” His smile starts to slip, and he shakes his head. “Less cardboard, more human.”

He swigs his beer, but when he lowers the glass, they’re all frowning at him. He frowns back until Skye rolls her eyes at him. “Only you could turn humanity into a bad thing, Ward.”

“It’s not _bad_ ,” he tells her, and her brow crinkles. He looks down at his beer. “It’s just fucking terrifying.”

They stay through a couple other ballads and then three more rounds of “Follow Your Arrow” before May mutters something about Sunday morning traditions and tosses money enough to cover their beer and queso onto the table. She squeezes Grant’s shoulder before she walks away, her eyes warm when they meet his, and he tries to smile at her. Skye finishes off the last of their pitcher while Simmons orders and downs another gin and tonic, and they walk out into the summer heat as a trio, Simmons’s arm slung around Skye’s shoulders.

“You are such a clingy drunk,” Skye complains without sounding annoyed.

“And you enjoy it immensely,” Simmons retorts, and pokes her in the side.

They drop Simmons at home before they head to Skye’s place, Skye staring out the window while she rests her feet on the dashboard. She’s ditched her flip-flops in the foot well, tapping her bare toes along with the songs on the radio. They’re turning into her parking lot when she asks, “Being human’s the hard part, isn’t it?”

Grant snorts a little. “Says the most human person I’ve ever met.”

“I’m only the most human because you work in an office full of crazy competent freaks who belong in a freaking comic book,” she retorts, elbowing him across the console. “You forget what my life was like before I decided to slum it with the mechanical but also cardboard quilled woodland creature. You ever want to compare prickles—”

He parks in front of her building before he glances over. “Do you have a point?”

She rolls her eyes at him. “You want my point? Fine, here it is: you want to date Fitz, then date him. You don’t want to date Fitz, then don’t. But don’t create this bullshit story about how he ‘makes you better’ and that scares you.” She shifts to meet his eyes. “What scares you is opening up yourself to _anybody_ , whether or not it’s actually Fitz. Because it means that they can see under the armor to what lies in _here_.”

Without warning, she reaches over and plants her hand in the middle of Grant’s chest, her fingers spidering out across his t-shirt. He tries to jerk away, but his car’s too small for him to even break the contact. He considers smacking her wrist before he remembers that she’s a woman—and that she occasionally attends kickboxing classes at the YWCA.

Then, he thinks about how rarely anyone touches him, and his shoulders soften.

Skye runs her thumb over his shirt a couple times before she draws her hand away. “Sooner or later, your armor’s going to crack,” she says as she pushes the passenger side door open. “The question is whether you want Fitz there when it does, or if you want to blow your chance and lose him _and_ the armor.”

She slams the door hard behind her, and Grant watches her retreat while the radio plays, of all possible songs, Elton John’s “Rocket Man.”

Halfway through the second verse, he sits too long at a stop sign to text _that song we sung at karaoke’s playing in my car_ to Leo.

And he’s at home a half-hour later when Leo texts back, _I just watched our video again on YouTube because it always makes me smile_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am taking drabble prompts over at tumblr to celebrate 600 followers. [Stop by if you're interested in participating!](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/82236300121/the-600-follower-drabble-party)
> 
> A list of upcoming MPU stories can be found [here](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/82335249042/mpu-future-fics-and-other-endeavors).


	14. The Truth (or Dare)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant's both helped and hindered by a high school game and a healthy amount of vodka.
> 
> (Are you never happy, Skye?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a lot of discussion about sex in this chapter. I know, you're all very upset by this.
> 
> Thanks as always to Jen and saranoh, who are the greatest betas known to man (even if saranoh called Grant and Leo dumbasses like six different times.)

“We’re not teenagers,” Grant Ward complains as Skye leans over Simmons to top off his glass.

“Hush, grumpy-pants, and answer the question,” Skye counters, and she licks vodka off her thumb as she straightens back up.

Grant’s not sure how this all started, but he knows that, so far, their evening’s involved a lot of Cards Against Humanity, a lot of potato chips, and a _stunning_ amount of vodka. He feels warm from his head to the soles of his feet, and when he leans his head against the back of the couch, he swears the ceiling shifts. Skye’s opened all the windows in her apartment as wide as they go, and he listens to all the nighttime sounds: a distant siren, the late-August rain, the wind in the drapes.

“Grant,” Simmons says, and he closes his eyes. She pokes him in the thigh hard enough that he jumps a little. “Grant, to not answer the question is to cheat at the game.”

“To cheat at life,” Leo chimes in, gesturing with his glass.

“Yes, yes, to cheat at life, too, but right now, Fitz, I am talking about the _game_.” Simmons leans into Grant’s personal space so far that she almost falls into his lap; next to her, Skye giggles. “You need to answer.”

“I’m thinking about my answer,” Grant lies.

“Your grace period’s expired,” Skye informs him. Her lofty tone’s belittled by how she swigs out of the vodka bottle. “You answer, or you forfeit.”

“And forfeiters get a long drink of the Apple Pucker.” Leo frowns for a moment. “That sounded not the way I wanted it to sound.”

Skye cackles. “Oh, I can think of one apple whose p—”

“Okay, okay,” Grant cuts them all off, and he raises his hands like he’s directing traffic. They’re sprawled all over Skye’s ridiculous living room, the girls and him on the couch while Fitz sits on the floor with his head almost on Grant’s knee. Grant surveys their pink, booze-warmed faces before he rubs his hand over his forehead. “First person I ever had sex with—”

“No, not _sex_ ,” Skye interrupts, shaking her head. She points the neck of the vodka bottle vaguely in his direction. “I didn’t ask the first person you had sex with. That’s boring. I asked the first person you _fucked_.”

He frowns. “There’s a difference?”

Simmons flashes him a sad, indulgent smile. “There are many potential degrees of sex.”

Leo sighs and rests his cheek against Grant’s knee. “Here we go,” he laments.

“None of that from you, I am about to teach our friend the intricacies of human sexuality.” Skye snorts into the vodka as Simmons flips her hair out of her face. “You see, sex is the basic act, but _beneath_ that heading, we have making love, and quickly getting off, and—”

The words turn into an undignified squeak as Skye plasters her hand over Simmons’s mouth. “What Jem’s trying to say,” she explains while the other woman rolls her eyes, “is that we want to hear about the first time you really went _after_ somebody. Real, put-your-back-into-it _went_ for it.”

“Uh, yes, well, for the record,” Fitz says, his face moving from “slightly pink” to “beet red,” “I did not ask this question and am not in the least bit curious.”

Skye cocks an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Really.”

Simmons attempts to protest, her words turning to muffled mumbles under Skye’s hand, and Grant sighs. “Fine,” he says, and Simmons immediately stops half-shouting. He tips his head back up to the ceiling. “The first person I really ‘put my back into it’ with was probably the guy I dated right out of college.”

The three of them fall pin-drop quiet. Grant lowers his head long enough to sip his vodka; he’s on his second mouthful when Skye prompts, “And?”

“And what?”

“And there needs to be more detail to it than that!” Simmons laments, and Grant rolls his eyes. “No, when Skye asked me about the worst prank I ever pulled at boarding school, I answered in excruciating detail!”

“And I told you all about my fictional pet monkey,” Leo chimes in, his cheek back against Grant’s leg.

“And when you dared Jemma and I to make out, there was _definitely_ tongue,” Skye reminds him. 

Simmons tilts her head down in a failed attempt to hide her blush. “You were quite good at that, actually,” she murmurs.

“Wait until it’s your next dare,” Skye challenges, complete with a cheesy wink. Leo wrinkles his nose, and Grant shakes his head at the two of them. This time, when Leo settles back down, he rests the whole side of his body against Grant’s leg. Grant only realizes he’s petting Leo’s hair when Leo sighs. He swigs his vodka, then keeps it up.

“The point,” Skye stresses, pointing the bottle at Grant again, “is that truth or dare requires _detailed_ truths. Otherwise, it’s all: ‘Have you ever kissed another girl? Yes? Okay, awesome, next.’” She leans over to jab Grant with the bottle. “Defeats the purpose.”

“You’re very serious about your high school games,” Grant informs her, pretending not to notice the way Simmons glances down Skye’s top.

“I’m very serious about _everything_ ,” Skye retorts, and splashes more vodka into Grant’s glass before she sits up again.

Grant snorts at that—because “Skye” and “serious” rarely belong in the same sentence—and stares down at the still-rippling booze before he exhales slowly. “First guy I dated out of college, was—a little older,” he admits carefully. Skye’s mouth falls open, and he holds up a finger. “No, I’m not going to tell you how old he was, or _who_ he was. We worked together at the county administrator’s office. He was kind of my mentor, actually.”

“Suddenly, your Coulson thing makes _so_ much sense,” Skye declares.

Simmons blinks and tips her head at him. “You have a Coulson thing?”

“I’d much rather have a Barton thing,” Leo puts in.

“No, I don’t— Do you want to hear about this or not?” Grant demands, and Skye actually looks chastened as she sips out of the vodka bottle. He stops petting Leo’s hair to scrub his fingers through his own. “We dated for a year,” he explains, “and he— Well, it turns out he has a thing for younger guys, because he’s with somebody else now. Has been for a couple years. But up until that point, all my relationships were fumbling-in-the-closet kinds of situations. He—” Grant feels heat creep down under the collar of his t-shirt. “He showed me that relationships don’t all have to be like that.”

He finishes the story by knocking back a couple hard swallows of his drink, aware the whole time that Skye’s staring him down. Her eyes narrow, lips pursed into a frown, and he rolls his eyes as he sets his glass down on the coffee table. “What?” 

“If he was a lot older, how were _you_ the one putting your back into—”

“That is a stereotype,” Leo volunteers, and Grant snaps his jaw shut before his half-formed rude comeback leaps out. The other guy sits up straight, finishes off the last three mouthfuls of his vodka in one fell swoop, and only coughs once before he jams his glass down next to Grant’s. “There’s no rule that it’s always the older person or the bigger person or the person with more muscles. Sometimes, it’s the wee one or the young one who—”

He falters at the end of the sentence, and Grant can’t help the stupid smile that crawls all over his face. “It was a pretty even give-and-take,” he admits, and he laughs a little as Skye gapes openly at him. “Like Leo said: stereotype.”

“Okay, I am scarred for life,” Skye declares, holding up both hands, vodka bottle included. The vodka splashes around, and she stares at it for a second before she refills all of their glasses. “And now that I know way too much about your sex life—”

“You _asked_ ,” Fitz-Simmons chorus.

“—you get to pick on one of us.” She sprawls back on the couch, her hair spread all over her shoulders like something out of a Renaissance painting. For a very brief second, Grant wishes he were just a little bit straighter. “But make it a good one.”

Grant rolls his eyes at her and picks up his glass, sipping while he deliberates. Skye only accepts dares, Simmons only accepts truths, and Leo—

Grant’s not sure he trusts himself to pick on Leo without his questions—or dares—turning self-serving. Finally, though, he shrugs. “Simmons,” he says, “truth or dare.”

“Typical,” Skye mutters, and Leo actually reaches around to pinch her ankle. She kicks at his hand while Simmons squirms.

Squirms, swigs her vodka like a woman nearing an awful fate, and then answers, “Truth, I think.”

“Truth,” Grant echoes, ignoring Skye’s eye roll. He suspects Skye wanted to be next, priming the pump for Simmons’s terrifying “next dare.” He’s willing to bet money it’ll involve more tongue-kissing. He smiles to himself. “Okay, here’s one: if you absolutely had to pick, right now, who in this room would you date—and why?”

Leo bursts out laughing hard enough that he almost beans himself on Grant’s knee, but beside him, the color immediately drains from Simmons’s face. She drops her eyes to her glass, her hair hiding her expression, and Grant notices a second later that Skye’s tipped her head up toward the ceiling. “You’re a bloody genius,” Leo half-whispers up to Grant, and Grant grins at him as he runs fingers through his hair again.

Leo releases a sound like a purr, and heat pools in Grant’s belly.

Simmons, however, stays very still and silent for a very long time. Long enough that Grant clears his throat before he says, “The grace period only lasts so long, you know.”

“I think I will go fetch the apple pucker,” she replies, and hops off the couch before anyone can protest. 

“And I need to pee,” Skye offers, but she follows it up by mouthing _fuck you_ to Grant.

Grant rolls his eyes over the lip of his vodka glass.

As soon as the girls are gone, though, Leo bounces to his feet and flops into Simmons’s warm spot on the couch. “That was brilliant,” he informs Grant, leaning a little against him. Well, a little at first and then a lot, their legs bumping and Leo’s shoulder pressed firmly against Grant’s upper arm. 

He shrugs. “I didn’t expect her to run off like that.”

“Jemma’s not always good at emotions,” Leo replies with a wave of his hand. “She thinks she is, talks like she’s the expert on feelings, but when you corner her and make her feel things—” He shakes his head. When he drops his hand, it lands on Grant’s leg, and Grant swallows harder than he means to. “Oh, sorry,” Leo mutters, and starts to pick it up.

“No, you don’t have to,” Grant says, and he curls his hand around Leo’s wrist without even thinking about it. The skin there’s soft and smooth, unblemished, and he swears he can feel Leo’s pulse. Or maybe, he thinks, it’s his own pulse, thrumming like a humming bird somewhere deep in his chest. “Leo,” he says quietly, and Leo blushes as their eyes meet.

He wants to blame the vodka or proximity for what happens next, but either way: one second, Grant’s drawing in a deep breath, and the next, the space between them’s replaced by a hot, wet kiss. Hot, wet, and _greedy_ , Leo’s fingers digging into Grant’s thigh as Grant reaches up and threads his fingers through Leo’s hair to hold him as close as possible.

Leo moans, a chest-deep rumble that lights Grant on fire, and he forgets entirely about Leo’s hair to grab his arm and drag him halfway onto his lap. He forgets entirely about Skye and Simmons, about the vodka on the coffee table and the rain outside, because Leo’s hands are on his shoulders, and then his neck, pulling him closer and closer still as he swings a knee over Grant’s legs and—

“Okay, wow, you are _not_ fucking on my couch,” Skye declares, and Leo and Grant both jump hard enough that Leo almost falls onto the floor. He scrambles off Grant’s lap, red-faced and wide-eyed. Skye, however, just holds up her hands. “No, listen, I don’t care how much I want you two to work out your weird issues and finally fuck, it’s not happening on my couch and _not_ after you pulled that stunt earlier.” She jabs a finger at Grant, and he stops panting long enough to rub a hand over his face. “I’m exercising a drunk-screw veto.”

“A what?” Leo asks breathlessly.

Grant ignores him to glare at Skye. “Okay, _first_ , we’re not screwing, we were kissing,” he protests, “and secondly—”

“A drunk-screw veto is where one of us stops the other one from doing something we’d regret,” she interrupts him, and he presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. “We have a lifetime allotment of ten, but because Grant never actually _acts_ on his impulses—”

“I swear to god, Skye, I will—”

“—I’ve never actually used one on him. And I’d be way happier if this was with anybody but his eternal crush, but I swear to the cute little baby Jesus, if I have to listen to him bitch and moan about how he wasn’t even sober enough to enjoy finally getting into your pants, I will actually kill him.”

“At least you know a lot of other lawyers who can defend you,” Grant snaps, and she scoffs. He grits his teeth because he can feel a new, angry heat brewing in the pit of his stomach. “But you’re not my mother, Skye, and if we want to—”

“She’s probably right,” Leo interrupts, and Grant feels his anger—and ten other emotions—instantly rush away. He apparently wears it on his face, too, because Leo shakes his head. “Not because— I liked that we were, you know, but I, uh—” He rolls his lips together and stares down at his hands. “I’d rather it not be a thing because of vodka and truth or dare and getting one over on Jemma. I want it to, uhm—”

He shakes his head again, a quick little jerk of his chin, and Grant swallows hard around the fear that’s still thickening the back of his throat. “I want the same thing,” he admits. “But I don’t know how to—”

“Ask.” When Leo meets his eyes, his face is so open and honest that Grant forgets how to breathe. “You just need to ask.”

“All right, so,” Simmons says suddenly, appearing in the living room with two shot glasses full of bright green Apple Pucker, “I am fairly certain this is going to be _disgusting_ , but a forfeit is a forfeit and—” She stops in the middle of her sentence to stare at the three of them—Grant and Leo still only inches from one another, Skye with her hands on her hips—and frown. “Did I miss something?”

“Not at all,” Skye lies, and liberates one of the shots from Simmons while she keeps staring.


	15. The Labor Day Party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don't ask.)
> 
> In today's installment, Grant's adventures as a lonely hedgehog finally come to a close.
> 
> (Thank you, Skye.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to my wonderful betas, Jen and saranoh, who endured a one-shot becoming a multi-part becoming this: the fifteen-chapter adventure of a cardboard hedgehog.

“Thank you,” Leo says quietly, “for inviting me. To come with you, here, I mean.”

It’s a balmy September evening, the kind where the wind just barely carries a chill, and Grant smiles a little as they wander down Stark’s driveway toward the car. The party’s still in full force—when they’d started saying their goodbyes, the Rogers-and-Barnes kid’d started demanding they all sing Disney songs together, and Stark’d seemed hell-bent on catering to her whims. Leo’d smiled politely at Banner and declined the invitation for them to stay longer, explaining that they planned on grabbing a cup of coffee.

Grant’s stomach swims, thinking about it.

Because an office party’s one thing, an actual coffee date—not that either of them’ve shoved a label on it—is another.

Grant’d originally planned on avoiding the party all together, because nothing said raw terror like the thought of spending his Saturday afternoon with Stark and the rest of the work gang. Darcy Lewis, on the other hand, had other ideas.

“You’re bringing your boyfriend to Stark’s Labor Day party,” she’d declared one day, and Grant’d almost dropped a stack of diversion files. “Everyone wants to meet him.”

“You have a boyfriend?” asked Sharon, the pretty blonde intern with the large collection of work-inappropriate blouses.

Grant’d rolled his eyes. “It’s a long story,” he’d said, and then glanced back at Darcy. “And I didn’t think Stark invited interns to the office parties—you excluded, of course.”

“He invites them when his husband really likes their adorable clerk boyfriends,” she’d replied with a wave of her hand. “Starts at three, bring some food and your swim trunks.”

She’d strutted off after that, leaving Grant to stare at her bobbing ponytail as she headed down the hall. “Seriously, you have a boyfriend?” Sharon needled.

Grant’d sighed. “I have a _something_ ,” he’d answered, and started sorting through the pile of folders.

The problem with Darcy’s invitation—if unyielding demands counted as invitations, that is—was that in the nine days since the truth-or-dare kiss (not that Grant’d counted), he and Leo’d spent a lot of time together without ever _talking_ about the kiss. They’d eaten lunch in the cafeteria, they’d grabbed pizza after work, they’d headed to the cheap theater to catch a movie . . . and all without either of them crossing the line from “friends spending time together” to “guys who really want to kiss a lot more often.” 

Even walking out to his car a full two weeks after kissing on Skye’s couch, Grant still wants to kiss Leo. He’d happily kiss him all the time, if the opportunity arose.

He’d explained this and the invitation to Skye one day at lunch. Skye’d snorted at him and stabbed vindictively at her salad. “Invite him or don’t invite him,” she’d informed him, “because I really don’t care.”

Grant’d sighed and set down his glass a little harder than necessary. “Are you still pissed off at me because of truth or dare?” he’d demanded.

“ _Yes_ ,” she’d immediately snapped, and she’d jabbed a piece of romaine so hard that one of the tines snapped off her plastic fork. She’d sworn at it under her breath and pushed her whole tray off to the side. 

Grant’d raised an eyebrow. 

“No, I’m not,” she’d admitted after another couple seconds, digging her fingers into her hair. “I mean, maybe. I don’t know, okay, Ward? I knew what I was doing before you asked her about dating one of us—or at least I thought I did—and now, we’re back in the ‘one step forward, two steps running in the other direction’ holding pattern.” 

Grant’d smiled a little. “You could just tell her you have feelings for her,” he’d pointed out.

She’d rolled her eyes. “Yeah, okay, Mister Pot,” she’d retorted. He’d frowned, and she’d blinked at him. “Pot. As in ‘pot calling the kettle black.’ I swear to god, I am going to buy you a book of idioms and annotate it.”

“Maybe you just need to stop using pop culture references and clichés all the time.”

“Maybe you need to shut the hell up,” she’d snapped back at him. When he’d laughed, she’d plucked a cherry tomato from her salad and flung it at his head.

Simmons, predictably, had offered no help whatsoever. “Fitz loves those little tiny flavored margaritas in the cans,” she’d said, and Grant’d frowned at her. “When you’re picking up something to bring to the party, bring those. He likes those.”

“I’m not necessarily inviting him to the—”

“You will,” she’d said with certainty, and then, she’d returned to her filing.

May’d just narrowed her eyes. “Ask him.”

“Does everyone know my business?” Grant’d demanded as he came down the back steps of the courthouse. At the bottom of the stairs, May’d planted her hands on her hips. “Did Skye start a listserv about my personal life? Are you sending up smoke signals?”

May, for her part, had tipped her head slightly to the left. “Ask him or stop complaining about it,” she’d said tersely, and then walked off into the parking lot.

Grant’d stood on the steps for a long time, after that.

And when he’d texted Leo to ask him to the party, he’d said yes.

He thinks about that now, his hands in his pockets as they approach his car (parked halfway down the block because Darcy’s directions had included the wrong house number) in the cool September evening. And he thinks about Leo’s face as they stared at each other on Skye’s couch and the earnestness with which he’d said, _You just need to ask_.

Grant wets his lips.

“Hold up a second,” he says, one of his hands reaching out to snag Leo by the arm. Leo freezes immediately, his eyes wide with surprise, and Grant— Against his better judgment, Grant holds onto him, stroking his thumb over his skin. Leo’s shoulders relax like he’s sighing.

Grant swallows the nervous feeling that’s lived in the back of his throat since the day he first met Leo Fitz, the cute clerk in the skinny jeans.

“Skye’s probably warned you about this, but just in case she hasn’t: I’m bad at relationships.” Leo’s lips quirk into half a smile, and Grant raises his free hand. “No, I mean it. I’m humorless, I’m antisocial, I wouldn’t know how to be considerate if an instruction manual came up and bit me in the ass. I retreat into my own head when I’m overwhelmed, or I convince myself my friends don’t matter, or _both_.” He casts his eyes down at his fingers, still wrapped around Leo’s arm, and he shakes his head. “Even when I want to be good to someone or help them—like Skye and her birthday, or she and Simmons during truth or dare—I end up fucking it up.”

Leo chuckles a little, the sound low and warm. “You’re making a compelling argument for me cancelling our coffee plans to go wash my hair,” he teases, and for a second, Grant swears his heart’ll explode.

It doesn’t, though, it just races, and he forces himself to smile as he trails his hand down Leo’s arm. He touches his slender wrist, his long fingers, and then releases him. He shoves both his hands in his pockets. “I’m not good at anything you’re supposed to be good at by the time you’re our age,” he finally says, raising his eyes to meet Leo’s, “but I’d like to try and get better at it. With you, if you’re at all interested. And if you’re not, then—”

There’s a thousand more parts to the speech—Grant’s rehearsed it in his head a hundred times, playing and replaying his own explanation until he can recite it like the rules of evidence—but apparently, Leo’s not interested in them. Because suddenly, there are arms around Grant’s neck and hot, greedy lips on his, and Grant immediately forgets everything in the universe except the heady, overwhelming feeling of kissing Leo Fitz. By the time he grabs Leo’s hips and drags their bodies together, Leo’s sighing into his mouth and digging fingers into his hair; by the time Grant’s pushed Leo back against his car, his fingers are up under Leo’s shirt, seeking out his skin while Leo wraps a leg around his. 

They kiss like they did on Skye’s couch, long and demanding, until Grant’s lungs burn and Leo’s face is red. And even then, Grant bends his head into the crook of Leo’s neck, leaving stubble burn in his wake as he tastes his pulse point.

“You know,” Grant says after a few minutes, once his breathing’s returned to normal and Leo’s no longer scratching fingernails across his lower back, “I didn’t technically ask, yet.”

Leo tips his head back and laughs in a way that goes straight to the pit of Grant’s belly. “You can ask me over coffee tomorrow,” he says, “because I’m bloody tired of waiting.”

Grant raises an eyebrow. “Tomorrow?” he asks carefully.

Leo’s cheeks redden, but his eyes are full of promise. “Tomorrow, Mister Cardboard Personality Boy Intern,” he says, and reaches up to kiss Grant again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a tiny sort of "missing scene" moment from this story I will post next week; other than that, this chapter is the final one. Thank you for reading this silly little adventure of Grant the cardboard hedgehog and his quest for love!


	16. Bonus Chapter: After the Poker Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grant Ward is a legal intern at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office. He is also, apparently, both cardboard and a hedgehog. (Don’t ask.)
> 
> Grant Ward also never figured out that his friend Melinda May is married to his boss's boss, but that's another story.
> 
> (Skye knew. Skye knows everything.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This scene is a brief coda to [Chapter 2](http://archiveofourown.org/works/999399/chapters/2090155), taking place that same night. Nick Fury and Melinda May's relationship is explored at length one-shot story ["Duty of Candor."](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1518497)

“I’m not speaking to you until I’ve had a pound of aspirin and a good night’s sleep,” Melinda May informs her husband as she drops into bed.

She’s sure he thinks he’s clever, staying still and silent in the dark of their bedroom, but she hears the way his breath hitches when he swallows a laugh. She shoves him hard enough to shake the bed, and he releases another tell-tale huff. “We’ve been married long enough that I know what you sound like ten seconds before you gloat. You might as well admit it.”

“Me, gloat about you drinking your weight in Skye’s cheap-ass vodka and regretting it? Never.” Melinda shoves him again as he rolls over onto the other shoulder and settles there. He’s all of a foot away, maybe less, and she can feel the heat radiating off his skin. He runs hot, which she finds comforting nine months out of the year.

The other three, their sheets end up on the floor and they spend half their nights arguing about who’s responsible for changing the thermostat.

A car rolls down the street, and she catches his smile in the half-second flash of headlights. “She swore she bought a different brand,” she informs him. 

“And?”

“And she lied.” When he chuckles again, she smacks him in the chest. “Whatever happened to you texting me to remind me I’m not twenty anymore?”

“It went out the window around the time I got the silent treatment for putting forty-five candles on your birthday cake.” She snorts a laugh and starts to roll her eyes, but the gesture actually hurts. Her pained groan apparently sounds worse than it actually is, because the next thing she knows, there’s a gentle hand stroking her hair back off her forehead. “Since when have a couple of twenty-somethings been able to drink you under the table?”

“Since they started betting shots instead of chips.” She rubs her face as though the bright spots behind her eyelids might fade away. “I hate poker.”

“Didn’t hate it so much back when we were at the AG’s office.”

“Back when we were at the AG’s office, I was dating a guy who threw the game so he’d be the first one naked.” His surprised bark of laugh echoes in the dark, and Melinda elbows him. “If you wake them, I’m not responsible,” she warns.

“Won’t be the first time I told them their mom’s on a bender and needs Dad to read them their fairy tales.” She turns to shoot him a dirty look, but he retaliates by crowding into her personal space. He’s spent the last twenty-plus years of their lives climbing under her skin without invitation, leaning close enough that she can smell the spice of his deodorant and the hazelnut creamer from the coffee he swears he drinks black. She reaches up and cups his cheek momentarily. “They say two girls’ nights a month’s unfair, y’know,” he comments while her thumb traces the scar that stretches an inch below his eye. “Said that Saturday night’s our movie night and you ruined it by playing poker with a bunch of toddlers.”

She tips her head at him. “Our children said that.”

“I might be paraphrasing.”

“Mmm-hmm.” She slides her fingers along the side of face and he takes the hint, leaning down to kiss her. It’s slow and lazy, the kiss of two exhausted parents who spent their Saturday morning split between pee-wee soccer games and household chores before wrangling children all evening—although, admittedly, the children at Skye’s loft probably required a lot more supervision than her own kids. Sometimes, she misses the day of hastily-stolen kisses in the copy room before she packed up and raced across the state to handle a high-profile prosecution, but right now, she sinks into her husband’s heat and sighs into his mouth.

Or rather, she does until he slides his hand under her t-shirt. Then, she pulls back and smacks his arm. “Nick, I am _so_ not drunk enough for you tonight,” she informs him.

She doesn’t need the flash of another car’s headlights passing by to see the laughter in his face, but it certainly helps. “As long as I get another chance in the morning,” he replies, and kisses her on the temple like he does every night.


End file.
